By the time most people call us, two other crews already couldn't find it. That's fine — fault finding is its own trade, and it's one of ours. Instruments that measure where the fault is instead of guessing, a registered cabler licensed to fix what they find, and a visit that ends with an answer either way.
Prefer to talk? Call Chris — 0412 853 618
Tell us the story — what fails, when, and who's already had a go — and Chris will come back with straight advice and a fixed callout price. Prefer to talk? Call 0412 853 618. Bring us the weird ones.
Every network fault is physical somewhere — a termination losing its grip, water in a joint, a kink behind a wall, a jumper punched over the wrong pair in 2014. The reason faults survive multiple technicians isn't that they're unfindable; it's that finding them requires instruments most crews don't carry and a layer of the network most aren't licensed to touch.
Unified Network Solutions does network fault finding across Brisbane and South East Queensland as a dedicated service: cable fault finding on copper, fibre fault location by OTDR, phone line faults, dead data points, and the building-wide mysteries that span all of them. We come from an IT background, hold ACMA Open Cabler registration #42489, and carry the test gear that turns a haunted network back into an infrastructure problem with a location and a price. The visit ends with the fault found and fixed, or found and quoted — never with a shrug.
There's a particular kind of fault that arrives at our number: the one with a history. The ISP tested from their end and found nothing. The IT provider remoted in, replaced the router, and found nothing. An electrician had a look, tightened something, and found nothing. The fault, meanwhile, is still there — because it lives in the hundred metres of physical infrastructure none of those three could measure.
That gap is structural. ISPs test their network, not your building. IT crews see the logical layer, not the copper. Electricians know power, not data pairs. The physical communications layer between them all belongs to a registered cabler with fault-location instruments — and that's a short list that we're proudly on.
So the jobs we love most are the ones with a folder of failed attempts. The history isn't discouraging; it's diagnostic gold — every failed fix eliminates a layer, and what's left is usually exactly where we'd point the TDR first.
A connection crosses six territories between the street and your screen. We test all of them, because the fault doesn't care about trade boundaries.
Water in the pit, roots in the lead-in cable, the conduit crushed under the 2009 driveway — rain-correlated faults start here more often than anywhere.
In multi-tenant buildings, the frame is fault central: jumpering punched over live pairs, bridge taps from cancelled services, corrosion on forty-year-old blocks.
Failed terminations, marginal punch-downs that pass at idle and fail under PoE load, and the patch lead someone stepped on — instrument-visible, eye-invisible.
Kinks behind walls, staples through jackets, cable crushed by the new shelving — the TDR reads the distance, and the damage is found without opening the whole wall.
Microbends, failed splices, connector contamination — OTDR tracing reads the whole link and reports every event with its distance, down to the metre.
And when the cable tests clean, the fault is in the air — interference, roaming, congestion — which crosses into WiFi troubleshooting, the same visit, same instruments van.
Fault finding has no warranty card. The network we test is the one you have — whoever built it, however long ago.
No records? Normal. Most sites we fault-find have no documentation at all — the installer is three tenants gone. We trace and map as we test, so the visit leaves you with both the fix and the beginnings of the documentation that should always have existed.
Old copper, new fibre, everything between. 1980s phone pairs, 2005 Cat5e, last year's OM4 — the instruments span the eras, and so does the registration. Whatever's in your walls, it's testable.
No blame, no lectures. Whoever installed it, however badly — our job is the fault, not the autopsy. You get findings and a fix, not a sermon about the previous guy. (The photos speak for themselves anyway.)
After enough years of fault finding, the mysteries develop genres. A few patterns we see on rotation — and what they turned out to be.
Moisture in a pit joint or a degraded lead-in, nearly every time. The cable tests progressively worse as the ground saturates — the TDR watches the fault move with the weather.
Thermal expansion working a marginal termination loose, or equipment cooking in an unventilated cupboard. Heat-correlated faults have a measurable signature long before the failure hour.
Something moved, and a cable paid for it — crushed under the machine, kinked behind it, or unplugged into a neighbouring port. The newest change is always suspect number one.
Their contractor was in the shared riser or the MDF. Cross-checks of the frame and riser find the punched-over pair or the borrowed cable in under an hour.
Scheduled load: a machine cycle, a backup window, the lunch microwave next to the AP. Time-correlated faults get diagnosed by being there at the right time with the right instrument.
It never is. "Random" means the trigger hasn't been spotted yet — and the underlying physical weakness still shows on a loaded test. This genre produces our favourite phone calls afterwards.
It starts with the story — when it fails, what changed, who's tried what. Symptom patterns narrow the territory before a single instrument comes out, which is why we listen first and test second.
Then the instruments work the suspect path: continuity and wiremap to find the broken, Fluke certification to find the marginal, TDR distance-to-fault to locate the damage, OTDR where fibre's involved, loaded PoE testing for the faults that only appear under power. Each result either clears a section or convicts it — and the territory shrinks until the fault has an address.
Then the fix: terminations re-punched, joints remade, sections replaced, jumpering corrected — most of it within the same visit, because the van carries what the diagnosis usually needs. You finish with the fault gone, the cause explained in plain English, and the test results in writing. If anything needs a return trip (excavation, parts, after-hours access), it's quoted before we leave.
What fails, when, and who's already tried — the pattern usually names the territory before we arrive, and we arrive with the right gear for it.
End to end with instruments — wiremap, Fluke, TDR, OTDR, loaded tests — clearing or convicting each section until the fault has a location.
Most faults are repaired in the same visit by the registered cabler who found them. Bigger fixes are quoted on the evidence, on the spot.
The cause, the fix, and the test results documented — plus whose-side evidence for your ISP if the fault turned out to be theirs after all.
Chris's standing promise: we find the faults the IT and telco crews couldn't. It's on this page because we keep keeping it.
TDR, Fluke DSX, OTDR, spectrum analysis — distance-to-fault measurement that replaces guessing with locating. Most callout vans don't carry this; ours is built around it.
Pit, lead-in, MDF, rack, wall, wireless — one team licensed and equipped across every territory a fault can hide in. No layer is somebody else's problem.
ACMA Open Cabler #42489 — the diagnosis and the repair in one visit, instead of a report you have to hire someone else to act on.
“We had one of those intermittent faults that's impossible to describe — “it just stops working sometimes.” Most people would've shrugged. UNS actually tested the cabling and gear methodically until they found it. Fixed it once, hasn't happened again. That was about a year ago now.”
A standard fault-finding visit is a fixed-price callout — typically a few hundred dollars — covering the diagnostic work: testing, locating, and a written finding. Many faults (terminations, patching, configuration) are fixed within the same visit at no extra labour. Faults needing excavation, new cable runs, or parts are quoted on the spot with the diagnosis as evidence. You always know the price before we proceed. Call Chris on 0412 853 618.
Yes — most of our fault finding is on other people's work: cabling from previous tenants, installs by long-gone contractors, networks that grew over decades with no records. The instruments don't care who installed it. We trace, test, and locate on any copper, fibre, or network infrastructure, and as registered cablers we're licensed to repair whatever we find.
With instruments that measure distance-to-fault. On copper, a TDR (time-domain reflectometer) and the Fluke DSX read the cable's electrical signature and report how far along the run the fault sits — often within a metre. On fibre, an OTDR does the same with light. Combined with tracing and route knowledge, "somewhere between the office and the shed" becomes "two metres past the garden tap" — and the excavation is one hole instead of a trench.
This is our most common starting point. The fault lives in the physical layer neither of them can test: the cabling between the wall and the rack, the lead-in, the patch panel, the MDF jumpering. We test end to end across all of it, find the actual fault, and either fix it on the spot or hand you documented evidence of exactly whose side it's on — which ends the circular blame in one visit.
Yes — crackling lines, dead extensions, faults that come and go with the weather. Phone line fault finding on the private side is registered-cabler work: we test the pairs, locate the degradation, and repair or re-run the cabling. Where the fault is on the carrier's side of the boundary, you get the test evidence that makes your provider's escalation process actually move.
Intermittent faults are physical faults with a trigger — heat, moisture, vibration, load. The trick is testing for the underlying weakness rather than waiting for the symptom: a marginal termination shows up on a Fluke test even while it's "working", water-affected cable has a measurable signature between failures, and a PoE run that browns out under load fails a loaded test on demand. The fault that vanishes for everyone else usually can't hide from instruments.
The honest checklist: reboot the router and switch (genuinely), check every cable at both ends is firmly seated, try a different patch lead on the affected outlet, and note whether the problem follows the device or stays with the location. If it survives all that — or it's intermittent, or it's been bounced between providers already — it's instrument territory, and that's the visit we do.
We service Brisbane CBD, North Brisbane, South Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Moreton Bay, Redlands, and the wider South East Queensland region. For larger projects, we can service regional Queensland by arrangement.
Cable fault finding, fibre fault location, phone line faults, and network troubleshooting across Brisbane CBD and metro, Logan, Ipswich, Redlands, Moreton Bay, the Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast — businesses with revenue on the line, buildings with histories, and homes whose fault has outlasted three technicians. Bring us the one nobody can find; that's the work this service was built for.
Tell us the story — the symptoms, the timing, the failed fixes — and book the visit that ends with the fault located, explained, and gone.
Call 0412 853 618 Book a Fault-Find Online
Unified Network Solutions