Requiring certification of your network cabling puts the cabling contractor on notice: you won't be accepting substandard components or work – so don't even try. Contractors who cut corners may not bid when certification is required – and that's a simple way to weed those firms out. 

 Further, since certifying will show the performance details of the link including crosstalk and return loss, you'll have a clear picture as to why a link might fail. 

 Testers such as DINTEK's Continuity Twin-Testers provides instant identification of most common voice and data cabling problems including shorts, opens, reversals, and incorrect polarity. 

 This allows the contractor to remedy those problems quickly, keeping your project on schedule, before full certification testing is carried out.

When several stakeholders – the installer, the owner's network team and the manufacturer – all have the potential to impact performance, wouldn't it be nice to have a certification report that shows the network performed at the time of installation? That makes it difficult for anyone to point the finger when performance issues arise down the road.

Network downtime extracts a painful price in lost revenue, lost productivity, diminished customer service and competitive disadvantage. The Contingency Planning Group performed a study that estimated the cost of an hour of enterprise network downtime between USD$14,500 and USD$6,500,000, depending on the industry. The Gartner Group estimated that an hour of enterprise network downtime costs USD$300,000 per hour, on average. 

 If an enterprise is challenged to improve its annual uptime from 99.9% to 99.99%, it needs to reduce downtime by eight hours. Using the Gartner Group's conservative estimate of downtime cost, this saves an enterprise hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.