apple news/media reports
07/23/2007, 9:35am, EDT
Monday, July 23rd
Duke: Cisco tech to blame for iPhone issue
The chief information officer for Duke University has issued an explanation of the service outages recently caused by iPhones. According to Tracy Futhey's official statement, the problem was caused by a "Cisco-based network issue" -- Duke is said to use a "very large" Cisco wireless system, one which supports multiple network protocols. But Futhey confirms an Apple statement that the issue has been already been resolved without recurrence, thanks to a fix from Cisco, and advice from Apple.
While Futhey notes that Duke is still trying to "fully characterize" the problem before releasing more information, he claims there is nothing specific about the iPhone that is responsible. Initial reports indicated that the iPhone's Wi-Fi roaming feature was to blame, since it would repeatedly hunt for the MAC addresses of invalid router addresses as it attempted to switch from one hotspot to another. This supposedly flooded Duke's network, and the university originally denied that Cisco had any responsibility for the outages. Both Apple and Cisco are said to be long-term corporate partners with Duke.
Filed under: Apple
, 
, 7
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
Top
subscribe to comments
for this article
And, of course, "giving" meaning "we're adding $1000 to your tuition, but offering you a $500 device as compensation".
It's all the rage. Haven't you been to the Apple iTunes U site? Pay attention. There will be a quiz later.
With Bill Cannon, the Duke IT spokesman now speaking to the press, it is highly unlikely we will ever hear a mea culpa, a "we jumped the gun", a "I relied on my Apple bias rather than fully understand the full scope of the technical issue before opening my mouth" or anything even close.
Now that Cisco, once again, fixed a problem of theirs that looked bad for someone else, everyone's friends again.
But you sure aren't gonna hear any appologies.