a breakout box is a critical piece of electrical test equipment used to support integration testing, expedite maintenance, and streamline the troubleshooting process at the system, subsystem, and component level by simplifying the access to test signals. breakout boxes span a wide spectrum of functionality: (i) some serve to break out every signal connection coming into a unit while others breakout only specific signals commonly monitored for either testing or troubleshooting purposes; and some are used on electrical connectors and others are used on optical fiber connectors.