The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school’s pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time, the article adds. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple, but so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown.

“Because of the time of year for us, it’s not a severe problem,” Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke’s Office of Information Technology, told Network World. “But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It’s a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20-30 access points signaling they’re down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating.”

That’s because the misbehaving iPhones flood the access points with up to 18,000 address requests per second, nearly 10Mbps of bandwidth, and monopolizing the AP’s airtime. The access points show up as “out of service.” For 10-15 minutes, there’s no way to communicate with them.