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The UK telecommunications sector has been warned by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) of the potential security risks of using equipment made by the Chinese manufacturer ZTE.

Equipment made by another Chinese manufacturer, Huawei, is used extensively in the UK’s telecoms infrastructure but is subject to security checks by the NCSC’s parent organisation, GCHQ. It has been suggested that adding hardware from a second Chinese vendor would make these checks ineffective.

The role of the NCSC and other aspects of ensuring the security of telecommunications networks and the data held by telecoms providers are explained in the PTT course “Telecoms systems security”.

Experienced technicians take pride in finding and rectifying faults quickly, economically, and with minimum disruption to network services.

It is a skill that is perhaps taken for granted, except when it all goes wrong and the network falls apart for hours. As communications networks connect us to the services we all depend on, such disruption can have major consequences.

But is our experienced technician’s fault-finding abilities based on intuition, experience or logic, and is fault-finding a skill that can be learned?

PTT’s new online course “Network testing and fault-finding” provides the answers. Apart from describing structured approaches to fault-finding, the course describes the use of software utilities and test equipment for fault-finding and measuring network performance.