UPDATE: This is one of those stories where I should have known to not give the party making the complaints the benefit of the doubt. Turns out, they had to eat crow and admit that it was their Cisco hardware that was causing the problems, not Apple's iPhone.
It would seem that Apple's new iPod doesn't like to play nice with wireless networks:
The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University. Other stories on this topic
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. 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.
I can't say that I am surprised by this. A lot of wireless networking software is still largely immature since the technology is not as old and established as wired ethernet. My wireless software on Kubuntu often has a hard time figuring out what networks are available when my laptop comes out of hibernation, for example. Hell, in Windows getting it to reliably connect to my wireless network when I used encryption could be a fun-filled hour of trouble-shooting sometimes!
Something tells me that if Apple cannot get its act together and get this routing issue fixed, the iPhone is going to become gadget non grata on Duke's campus. One can only imagine how quickly it will get in trouble on campuses where there is less money to spend on bulking up the wireless infrastructure like many state schools. If it is struggling to safely jump between networks that badly (retaining routing information between networks) it should be banned. If it is already causing trouble during the summer, it'll only get worse during the school year to the point that the network will be unusable for everyone else.
Apple had better hurry up with a fix if they want to monopolize the market before somebody comes up with a better product. As the Sansa is superior to the iPod, so will some other (better) phone eventually come along...
I suppose a simple fix of this issue, for Duke at least, would be to simply ignore all MACs in the Iphone range, or failing that all Apple although that would cause issues for laptop users. the inconvenience to Mac users would be a small price to pay for keeping the network running.