It would be helpful if this product interfaced with AirWave.

The battery life should be improved. The real negative to the product is the horrible battery life.

We had hoped for it to be able to deliver configurations to our network switches, and I think they're developing something for that. However, it doesn't do that now. We were hoping that we would, as we replace or refresh network components, be able to use this tool to push a config file to the switch. For example, the Aruba switches that we're deploying come with a Bluetooth function where we can push configs from our phones. It would be much more convenient to use this device, rather than using our personal cell phones to do it. I think that the capability is there, but it just hasn't been figured out yet.

I don't really have any suggestions for improvement. Based on what is advertised and what we're using it for, it is not lacking anything that we would like it to do. It does everything that its little counterparts or little LinkRunners do, but it does a way better job at being able to do all things at once.

One point of contention might be that when we were starting it up for the first time, there was a little bit of confusion about registration and getting the proper support plans applied. So, that could be more streamlined, but that's not uncommon in the industry.

The only issue that I have ever had is the battery life. It does drain a little bit quickly. Generally, I don't move too far from my desk, and every part of our building has power. While it's true that by the time I'm finished with my assessment it's usually dead, I have usually finished what I need to do and everything has been pushed to Link-Live. But occasionally, I might need a backup battery if I need to do something for multiple hours.

We have had to use a battery pack unit when embarking on long testing or a series of testing. It is like a mini-computer, so it does require a great deal of battery life.

The tool is accessible to both highly skilled and less skilled individuals. However, while all skill levels can use it, the unskilled staff need some background knowledge and training to use it successfully. It is not a simple, test-and-go type of solution. Users need to understand what they are testing and what end results they need. I believe additional online training could solve this issue. Extended video training would be helpful so that less skilled staff members could be assigned training with the opportunity to review the tool. The training that is currently available is helpful, however, it can be a little overwhelming. Training modules could benefit from being more user-friendly and easier to navigate.

The reporting could be better, with more accurate measurements of loss over cables, impedance, etc. The mapping also needs to be improved. You should be able to do free formatting of the topology.

The small screen is a little bit of a handicap. It would be nice if we could, for instance, connect a larger screen to the device, but it's very user-friendly. You're only limited by the size of the screen. That's the only negative aspect of doing surveys with this device.

Also, in the first releases, I wasn't very happy about the WiFi function, but I have to say that they listened very well because, in the latest release, all my concerns were resolved. 

It is an Android device, so it is a little bit of dropdown, left-swipe, right-swipe, and that's not always very clear. Sometimes it's not very clear which screen you're looking at. Am I looking at a device configuration? Am I looking at the test configuration? But I think that comes from the Android operating system more than the EtherScope application itself.

In general, I'm pretty happy with the device. It's a light device, a portable device. It doesn't heat up. Some small devices sometimes heat up and it's not really fun to work with them. I don't see a lot of negative points. It evolved, of course. It has been on the market now for several years and I think it is a very mature product.

For troubleshooting, the pre-programmed AutoTest feature is not as intuitive as it could be because there are different windows.

The user interface could be a little bit more streamlined, a little bit easier. Sometimes it's hard to find a specific thing that you're looking for. 

In terms of hardware-based improvement, the battery would be the biggest issue. The battery goes out very quickly.

It would be nice to be able to use the device to test from the device and do a hyper-wireless to wired, while using the same device. You would plug it in on one side of the device and then use a wireless to run a throughput test of the wireless without needing a separate device. That would be great. 

Finally, the AirMapper Site Survey for wireless surveys still needs a lot of work. It's not as intuitive as it could be and it can only take readings one at a time. It doesn't do continuous surveying. It's okay at gathering WiFi site survey data, but it could be better. It's stop-and-go.

The largest complaint that we get is the battery life on the unit. If you are using it heavily, you get about five hours of usage out of it. In an eight hour day, that is not perfect for us. We would like more battery usage. The battery thing is annoying.

The battery life could be better. There have been a couple of times that I used it and put it down, then I went to pick it up and the battery was dead. So, I need to take the power cord with me in order to continue using it. 

Initially, one of the devices wasn't reading the information from the scans. So, we would do a scan, and it was giving us back erroneous information. Then, when we tested it on our other unit, that unit was fine. We tested the same problems with what we were troubleshooting. We tried testing it with our second unit and the second unit gave us the information that we needed, where our first unit did not. We kind of went back and forth doing that. Eventually we realized that the first unit on known, good scenarios, which were confirmed by the second unit, could not give us the right information. We knew at that point it was not working and that one of the particular unit was defective.

When it works, I love the AirMapper Site Survey app. Currently, my device has a hardware bug that the manufacturer and I are working on actively, to get it fixed or replaced. The 5 gigahertz radio on my device is flaky at best. When it works, I've enjoyed it.

I don't have any issues right now. However, in terms of my beta relationship, sometimes I'm at the forefront and I know there are timelines for certain fixes.

Even right now, it's come such a long way. They keep adding features to the software side and the hardware side functionality that I have, however, it’s mostly just priceless in the case of both hardware and software. I am able to do much more now.

On a hardware spec, it'd be nice to have something above 10-Gigs. I have recently started looking at some products that are 25, 40, and 100-Gigs. I realized they probably have something in the works already, however, there’s nothing I'm aware of and certainly, this device cannot do that. I would say that a tool that has above 10-Gigabit of support would be needed and of value in the near future.

However, as far as software and functionality, I really can't think of anything missing. Even all my creative tips on VNC, web server functionality, and remote access have been included over the last couple of years. I can't think of anything really off the cuff for software development that I would highly recommend.

We should be able to do online wireless design through Link-Live. We should be able to take the information that we've gathered and send a customer the way to fix it, in terms of moving APs and how that would affect things, within Link-Live.

The ease of use of AirMapper could do with some improvements. I don't use the AirMapper Site Survey app a lot. I have used it recently with the new 6 GHz device because effectively, it is the only device I have that can do that. For most of my site surveys, I use a different tool. AirMapper is very quick and easy once everything is on there, but I would like to see an improvement on how you get things on there. Currently, rather than being able to build up buildings or a site of things, every map is an individual piece. We should be able to set up an AirMapper survey easily and more effectively. At the moment, we just have separate floor plans. It'd be great to be able to build a building and tell where different floors are so that if it hears an AP on the floor below, it doesn't put two APs, one on that floor and one on the other floor, and it knows that there are two floors here. One is on top of the other, and it won't put the AP at both places. It would put it on one of the floors where it would be strongest. This would be one of the biggest improvements.

The training aspect needs improvement. They provide training, but if I am looking for something specific, then I have to sit through about an hour of training to learn about something that I may not have time to do. So, I probably have 40 hours of training for something that was five minutes of use.

From the demo, they show you a great deal of what the tool does. To actually learn how to do it, you probably have a learning curve that depends on what other tools you have used in the industry. That could go from 45 minutes to 4 hours just to learn how to use one of the applications.

For all its flexibility, make sure that you are prepared to spend the training time. While the training is available, it is just making sure that the person who will be working on it has the time available to train on it.

I am still learning the tool. The main reason that I purchased it was for the wireless troubleshooting capabilities and heatmapping. Those took me probably about six hours to properly learn everything that could be done with them, and I probably still don't know everything that can be done with them.

For my usage, I thought the training would be maybe an hour, but I ended up having to spend an additional four to eight hours just to make sure I could adequately translate the data. So, using the tool was not that difficult, but translating the data is where there is a breakdown in what you are demonstrated and what you can actually do.

The test profiles could be improved a bit. It could be better at managing and adding them, but more importantly, switching between different profiles. Some of the results from the tests could go a little deeper - maybe with an expert mode that allows you to review the pcap for any part of the process, such as, an automatic pcap generation. Especially on Link-Live, I would love it if they would make it so that you could see the capture file. For example, if you go to the DCP request portion of that report, then in a second screen, it will show you the capture file in the pcap. I think there is a lot of ability to improve this area.

I would love to see port profiles. This is something I've expressed to them. The ability for a technician to plug it into a switch port, and say, "Okay, this port will be an access point or this port will be a phone and desktop PC," thus choosing a profile. It will then push a configuration to the device it's connected to and verify that the switch port is correctly configured, so I can hand this to a phone tech who doesn't have any access to a network switch to be able to make changes. They can go out and plug this into a port, then they are able to push a profile to the switch port through the device. That would be pretty fantastic as a next step for this device.

The battery life is a little bit too short.

Also, there are some inconsistencies in how it uploads the test results to the cloud, but it might just need a minor improvement on the software side. When you don't have an internet connection on the EtherScope when you do the testing, it saves the results into memory. When it has an internet connection, it uploads those results, but it doesn't work all the time. Sometimes, you need to manually push it.

There is room for improvement in the battery life and price.

I've really had some positive experience with this product. But eventually, and I know it's not something that can be built directly into this product, I would like to see NetAlly provide a device, even if it's larger or more expensive, that can test the higher rate speeds like, 40 or 100 gigabits per second.

The only improvement I can come up with is the battery life. If they could improve the battery life, that would be great.

I use the NetAlly site and one of the things I don't like about the topology map, something I wish I could fix, is that the map kind of jiggles if you don't adjust any of the settings.

One of the things I'd like to be able to do with that feature is to grab a group of devices and drag them. For example, if you drag a switch, all the devices that are attached to that switch stay in the same spot. Your switch can be dragged all the way out to the far side of the page, but all the devices are still back in their original spot. That means there are all these lines and you have to go back and move all the individual devices. I wish there was a way to drag the device and its attached devices.

Another thing that I would love for the EtherScope nXG to be able to do is when I'm looking at a topology map. A lot of times it will say, "Unknown switch," and I'm pretty sure it's a phone that probably has a PC attached to it. I would love it if it could identify that.

Also, when running a discovery, it would help if there were something that makes it a little more obvious when the NetAlly device determines that the discovery is complete. There's a little percentage sign that runs up towards the top when the discovery is going, but I'd like a little more obvious sign that indicates, "Hey, we're still running. We're still trying to discover things." That way we won't pull it off before it's done.

Another point is that this product needs to come with a stylus. It doesn't work well with fat fingers.

If I could reset it remotely, meaning reboot the unit, that would be helpful. One time, the test would not respond; the script would lock up. I had to go and manually reboot it. If I could have sent a command to reboot and it would have automatically connected to the wireless, that would have made it perfect. That was the only thing that it did not do. If you're sitting remotely, at your desk, and the unit is at a customer's site and you need to reboot, the only way you can do that is to call up the customer and ask them, "Hey, can you go reboot it for me?" and customers usually don't like that.

NetAlly EtherScope nXG's reporting and table qualification could be improved. The disadvantages of NetAlly EtherScope nXG are its password life and end reporting.

NetAlly doesn't have a spectrum analyzer. I have to use other tools to view the spectrum, and this is a problem.

The one thing that it doesn't do well, when it's doing airtime utilization measurements, is that it will classify things as non-802.11, and that isn't correct. What it could do better is make sure that it classifies all traffic that's in the air correctly. That's something that I've complained to them about before. It can infer that you have interference that really isn't there.

Also, the ability to integrate it into automated testing is fairly limited. Part of what we do is automate things whenever we possibly can. The ability to integrate it into automated test environments more readily would be useful.

Finally, while it does support 802.11ax technology, if it were able to give us a bit more information about what's happening in the 802.11ax realm, it would be useful. For example, we can't use this device to determine when something like OFDMA is being used in a conversation between an access point and a client. So more 802.11ax-specific data would be useful.