Experienced technicians take pride in finding and rectifying faults quickly, economically, and with minimum disruption to network services.

It is a skill that is perhaps taken for granted, except when it all goes wrong and the network falls apart for hours. As communications networks connect us to the services we all depend on, such disruption can have major consequences.

But is our experienced technician’s fault-finding abilities based on intuition, experience or logic, and is fault-finding a skill that can be learned?

PTT’s new online course “Network testing and fault-finding” provides the answers. Apart from describing structured approaches to fault-finding, the course describes the use of software utilities and test equipment for fault-finding and measuring network performance.