The biggest improvement to my organization is with the LinkRunner 2000AT; that one has saved so much time for troubleshooting. Instead of having to get it up and down, up and down. Testing cables end to end. It allows me to test the cable by myself. Cutting out a half-hour’s worth of work down to minutes. I was able to justify it at my last three jobs, by having that much time saved for me to do troubleshooting. Whether it be the fiber or the copper, I can troubleshoot a lot easier just from one touch on the button. I’m able to map out whether it's a wearing problem, connector problem, somewhere in the middle, or if I need to look into it further. It helps me do initial troubleshooting a whole lot faster.

It improved my ability to see if there's any issue happening.

During the normal workweek, I can just find the training from over the weekend to see if I can duplicate the issue that happened and address it.

It depends on what the problem was. Let's say a user couldn't get out to the internet. I could unplug the cable from the back of their computer, and plug the Fluke in. Again, it's going to give me whether or not I can connect to the internet or not, so it breaks down whether it's the computer or the cable. If it is something with the cabling, it can even tell me if there's a break in the cable, and how far down the cable it is. If it makes it to the switch, I could tell what port it's plugged into; so simple things, too. If I go in a room and they want to find out what switch something is plugged into for whatever reason, I could plug the LRAT into the wall, into a port, and it's going to tell me if it's plugged into a switch, and what port it's plugged into.

It interacts well with other Fluke products. It even has a cloud component to it, so if I do a scan on a network I plug into a jack, it's going to give me all this information on the screen, but it's also going to send me an email and it's also going to post it to the cloud. If I'm working on one client and I'm troubleshooting a lot of cabling ports, I can go through, run the test, run the test. I'm not taking notes; I'm not having to jot things down into an Excel spreadsheet or anything. I can just test, test, test, test, and then at the end of the day, I can actually go online and print out a report of all the ports I tested, where they're plugged into the switch, and give it to the client.

If you want to trace out where a cable's plugged in, you can plug it into the Fluke. It'll trace out the length of the cable. It'll tell you what port that it's plugged into on the switch. It'll give you all the analysis of the network of what that port's doing and the IP address.

I honestly don't know if there is any room for improvement. They've gotten better over the years. It's all tied to a web interface now, so I think they're going in the right direction.