GL Communications (News - Alert) Inc., a supplier of test, monitoring, and analysis equipment for TDM, wireless, IP and VoIP networks, has released its newest product “PacketExpert” -- a Quad port wire speed Ethernet/Packet Tester.

“PacketExpert is a quad port wire speed Ethernet/Packet Tester. It supports 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports and connects to the PC through a USB 2.0 interface. Each GigE port provides independent Ethernet/IP testing at wire speed for applications such as BERT, RFC 2544, and many more”, said Jagadish Vadalia, senior manager, in a statement.

Vadalia said that it truly takes confusion out of Ethernet testing at all protocol layers - from raw Ethernet to IP/UDP (News - Alert) packets.

He said that it can also be used as a general purpose Ethernet performance analysis tool for 10/100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet local area networks.

Vadalia pointed out that two of the 4 ports have both Electrical and Optical interfaces, enabling testing on optical fiber links as well.

“A BERT application measures Bit Error Rate on Raw unframed Ethernet (Layer1), framed Ethernet (Layer2), IP and UDP data streams,” he added.

Vadalia said that various PRBS patterns such as 29-1, 211-1, 215-1, 220-1, 223-1, 229-1, 231-1 are supported. Also All Ones, All Zeroes, Alternate Ones and Zeroes patterns are provided as well as user-defined test patterns ranging from 1 bit to 32 bits.

He said that PacketExpert supports user-defined options to configure Ethernet/IP/UDP header parameters, including VLAN, frame size, and rate.

Vadalia further added that Per RFC 2544 specifications, PacketExpert supports throughput, latency, frame loss rate, and back-to-back tests.

“It includes various parameter configurations such as test selection, frame sizes, unidirectional/bidirectional, number of trials, trial duration, and many more. User-defined options to configure various packet header parameters, like MAC addresses, IP addresses, UDP ports etc. Results are displayed in both tabular as well as graphical format,” he concluded.