Telecommunications has advanced such that there is now a vast array of services and technologies available to consumers. As services become more sophisticated, and competition more widespread, there is a natural pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiencies in the administration of a telecommunication network.
Significant costs in network administration arise any time there is a need for a so-called “truck roll”, as a service technician is dispatched to find and repair a fault in the network. As a more specific example, in wired telephone networks based on traditional copper twisted-pair, very often a problem will require the dispatching of a service technician to physically attend at the central office that services the customer, and/or the customer sites, and/or a variety of locations in between in order to find and repair the fault. Where the distance between the central office and the customer is great, the costs are often higher.
Additionally, such expenses for truck rolls are becoming more acute as voice, video, internet and other services are added to traditional copper twisted pair networks. Such truck rolls can mean an unacceptably long mean time to repair, low employee productivity, a greater number of repeat calls, and an overall strain on meeting service level agreements. It is therefore desirable to have ways to test network connections over twisted pair networks and the like that reduce the reliance on technicians to be dispatched to specifically identify and repair network connections problems. Still further problems with prior art testing of network connections include a lack of ability to remotely test at the application layer and/or certain other layers above the physical layer of a given connection.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds