I think people need to stop jumping to conclusions. Maybe the "problem with the network" is that "there are too many iPhones on the network." This deals with every actual piece of evidence that people are putting forward to try to refute the original article. Is it really so hard to believe that Apple could put out a piece of hardware that does not behave nicely to others?

I'm not saying that the nytimes article is right, but just that people who say it's wrong are wrong.

As an analogy, you can take the routers that were stupidly configured to use stratum 1 NTP servers. These misbehaving devices placed too much strain on the NTP "network" because they used it inappropriately. But it was only the NTP servers that a lot of these routers were configured for that were having problems. Yet no one would claim that it's the NTP network's fault for the issues.