Who wires this panel
One narrow subject, a browser configured as a United States visitor, and a rule about where numbers are allowed to come from. This page says how the exam facts on this site were obtained, and what it refuses to publish.
Patchpanel covers one narrow thing: the certifications someone takes on the way into IT support. CompTIA A+ mostly, Network+ as the rung above it, Tech+ as the rung below, and the course-shaped alternatives that sit beside them.
The rule
An exam fact appears on this site only if it was read on the certifying body's own page, and it appears with the date it was read. Not a training provider's summary of that page. Not an aggregator. Not a forum consensus. The body's own page, dated.
That rule is easy to state and occasionally expensive to keep. The clearest example is the A+ exam fee: it is not on this site, because CompTIA does not publish one anywhere we could reach. The alternative was to copy a figure from a company selling vouchers and present it as research.
How the pages were read
Prices and product pages are local. The same address can serve a different figure, in a different currency, depending on where the request appears to come from — and the page rarely tells you which version you are looking at.
So every page cited on this site was opened in a browser configured as a United States visitor: United States locale, America/New_York time zone, an English-US language header. Where a figure had appeared, it would have been labelled as a United States figure and never converted into another currency. That method is recorded here so you can weigh what the figures mean rather than take them on trust.
What is missing, and why
| Figure | Why it is absent |
|---|---|
| A+ exam fee | CompTIA publishes none on any page read on 24 September 2026, including its own article about the cost |
| A+ pass rate | CompTIA publishes none; figures elsewhere carry no methodology and no CompTIA source |
| Salary for A+ holders | The source this site accepts is the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose site returned an access-denied notice to our automated requests on 24 September 2026 |
Vendor marketing claims get a narrower treatment: they may be quoted, attributed to the company making them, and labelled unaudited — or left out. They are never restated as findings. Two live examples are on the site: CompTIA's claim that A+ appears in more tech support job listings than any other IT credential, and the footnoted outcome claims on Coursera's Google IT Support page, which are described but not repeated.
What this site is not
- It is not affiliated with CompTIA, with Pearson VUE, or with any training provider named on it.
- It does not sell courses, vouchers, practice exams or coaching.
- It does not link, index or describe any site distributing real exam questions. That is a fixed position, explained on the practice-test page.
- It scores nothing out of ten. It has sat no exams and bought no courses, so a rating here would be a number with nothing behind it.
When a figure goes stale
Everything here was read on one day, and CompTIA changes versions, scores and fees. A dated figure that has since moved is wrong, and the date is printed so you can see how much risk you are carrying. If you find something that no longer matches the source, say so — naming the page and what it says now is more useful than anything else you could send.
How the site earns, and the two programmes it turned down, are set out on the earnings page.