But in one respect the network testing software tool of today is not much different from those in use a decade ago. Without fear of contradiction, I believe I can safely say that problems occurring at the lower open systems interconnection (OSI) layers have always been and will probably always be the plague of any software testing tool. This class of problem includes broken or poorly connected wire, “fogged” fiber-optic cable, electro-magnetic and radio frequency interference, misconfigured equipment, improperly conditioned lines, network congestion, lost data blocks, and protocols that silently discard frames and packets that cannot be handled.

It is true that the market has established the need for interoperable software testing tool. And international standards organizations have developed detailed, mutually agreed upon specifications for network operation that are more or less universally acknowledged.

And the myriad of networking equipment manufacturers (even IBM) have delivered products that have broken down the proprietary technology boundaries of the past. A market that was once dominated by individual manufacturers is now led by industry-wide forums containing manufacturers, users, and government agencies that gather to define and establish universally acceptable approaches to networking opportunities.

This is all true and it is all good, and yet the connection is still sometimes noisy, the wire still breaks, someone upgrades the software, someone moves a node, someone hangs a picture or digs a ditch and the trunk, coax, twisted pair, and so on is bisected.

When that happens, a real live person must get into an elevator, truck, airplane, or space shuttle and travel somewhere to make things work again. When that person leaves for the service call, some sort of test equipment had better go along, or the problem won’t get fixed properly, fixing the problem will cause other problems, the problem will take too long to fix, or the problem won’t get fixed at all.

All of these scenarios lead to the need for subsequent service calls or supplemented service calls, extended down time, loss of network-generated revenue, and unhappy network users. With the cost of commercial downtime skyrocketing and the cost of service calls easily exceeding $ 100 per hour, high-quality, easy to use, portable, and rugged wireless network analyzer equipment is clearly needed and can be easily justified.

This all leads logically to the conclusion that until truly self-healing networks are developed that can repair their own communications channels, instead of simply switching to a backup channel, there will be a continuing need for test equipment that can quickly and easily diagnose complex and simple problems.