A benchmark measures competence against a fixed snapshot of the network and its conditions. Telecom is non-stationary: new spectrum lights up, vendors swap, software baselines roll, and traffic habits shift seasonally and structurally. An agent that aced the exam in January can be quietly wrong by summer not because it got worse, but because the network moved out from under its assumptions.
The operational takeaway is to treat certification as perishable and tie trust to recency, not just to the score. An agent (or the system deploying it) should know the age of its certification, weight its confidence accordingly, and trigger re-evaluation when input distributions drift detectably from the training snapshot — rising fractions of unseen vendor parameters, novel alarm types, or traffic outside the modeled envelope.
Caveat: re-certifying too aggressively burns evaluation budget and can chase noise; anchor re-test cadence to measured drift in the live data rather than a fixed calendar where possible, and reserve forced re-certification for detected step-changes like a vendor migration.