Network Testers : Cheshire, Lancashire, Wigan, Warrington, Manchester, and Liverpool.

Testers are an important part of network implementation and fault finding process. Rather than using the basic continuity testers with LEDs that indicate if a physical link is present, Topological Limited confirms the success of the installation by using certification testers for copper cabling and Optical Time Domain Reflectometers (OTDRs) for fibre optic cables, from major suppliers including Fluke.

For clients wishing to upgrade the performance of the hardware to support Gigabit Ethernet or a new IP Telephony project, Topological Limited utilises a qualification tool (Ideal Technologies) that will check the cable performance for these applications on fibre optic or copper cables, including Bit Error Rate Tests (BERT) that will identify the quality of the data received, thus minimising the risk of dropped packets.

When responding to support issues, the Fluke Linkrunner and Nettool are ideal as they check for a connection to the computer system, obtaining an IP address from the DHCP server and sending ping messages to the DNS server. Another Fluke network tester checks the network for issues including duplicate IP addresses, thus improving the efficiency of the Support service.

The popularity of wireless technology is growing rapidly and too much wireless is normally worse than too little, especially in the 2.4 GHz range used by 802.11 b/g devices. When responding to wireless issues, the areas are checked with a scanning tool to see what wireless Access Points are discovered and a spectrum analyser frequently finds the problem is due to interference, as the client may have subsequently fitted a new product in the area that also operates in the same frequency band (such as cordless keyboards and Bluetooth products) without considering the consequences.