CTS 272: NetAlly’s BLE Survey & LANBERT

NetAlly continues to add features to their existing handheld tools. In this episode, we’re going to take a look at two features for the EtherScope nXG, the BLE survey and LANBERT which was showcased at Mobility Field Day 6. BLE is integrated into more and more APs nowadays (Mist, Aruba, Meraki…). BLE is leveraged for a lot of applications that we start to see being integrated into the WLAN infrastructure (Location, proximity tracing …). There are tools to do BLE design but not all of them can validate. We usually rely on the vendor tool to assess the BLE signal. With the EtherScope nXG, you can do a BLE survey and validate the BLE coverage. The EtherScope collects information from different types of beacons: Eddystone UID, Eddystone URL and iBeacon. And this is done while performing a Wi-Fi survey. LANBERT is a tool to assess the quality of transmission and available bandwidth of a cable or fiber. It measures the transmission of line rate Ethernet frames over your network cabling infrastructure. It’s a better way to do cable testing. It’s not just a simple pass/fail model. It shows the SNR and which speed will be supported. Noise is measured coming from ESD, crosstalk or EMF. Tests can be done over a longer period to detect any sporadic interference. You can make sure that your multi-gig link will link and stay at a multi-gig speed.