Duke and iPhone resolve problems

Earlier this week, there was a major issue over the iPhone apparently causing a Denial of Service attacks on the Duke wireless network, and the issue quickly blew up. Apple would have been in the forefront of attempts to make sure that this issue gets resolved due to the potential bad publicity for the iPhone. Well, it's now blown over, and Apple gets a clean chit:

Initial reports of the problem placed the blame for the outages squarely on Apple's iPhones, which flooded the Cisco WAPs (Wireless Access Points) with thousands of address requests per second. However, in a statement released this afternoon, Cisco Systems admitted that the problem was caused by a Cisco glitch.
The problem could be particular to Duke. Other large universities—specifically the University of Wisconsin at Madison—have not experienced problems with its registered iPhones and Cisco-based Wi-Fi network, according to Dave Schroeder, an administrator in UW's Division of Information Technology. "We have seen upwards of 120 unique iPhones since June 30 on our campus-wide wireless infrastructure, which also uses Cisco 802.11b/g access points. To date, we have not encountered or detected any undesirable behavior from iPhones," said Schroeder. "As I have also not heard reports of errant 802.11 iPhone behavior from any other institution or site, it appears that the issue at Duke may be unique. There may be something unique to Duke's particular wireless installation configuration that the iPhone may be exposing," he added.

Of course, that is something that needs to be investigated further. There is something in the Duke network that was causing the problems to happen, and there is no certainty that such issues will not happen again.
There is an additional comment in the bottom of the article quoted above that could also cause certain problems

"My suspicion is that Duke's network requires Cisco's (Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol) security encryption and the iPhone doesn't have that incorporated into it. That could be a source of the problem," said Van Baker, a research vice president at Gartner in San Jose, Calif.
"Cisco's LEAP is an enterprise deployment not seen in the consumer market at all. The iPhone doesn't have a lot of the features you'd normally expect to see in an enterprise class phone," he added.

This was certainly a negative comment by an analyst, and this is something that Apple needs to quickly address. Apple would want this phone to be adapted in the enterprise segment as well, those segments carry a number of phones with them.