The need for accurate time appears to be spreading far and wide across a very varied set of industries. In this paper, I will look at the development of time transfer across Telecom networks, the first sector to implement the transfer of accurate time by PTP across distributed network. The paper will also review how many other industries and in particular Data Centres, are now investigation and implementing the distribution of accurate time and the value it brings.
Time is an invisible utility, underpinning our digital infrastructure, the basis for global navigation satellite systems delivering Position Navigation and Time (PNT) information, synchronization of 5G networks and the energy grid, to timestamp traceability critical for trading platforms in financial services.
We have an increasing dependency on GNSS for PNT and our awareness of this dependency is poor. This puts us at significant risk of emerging and future applications being ‘dependent by default’ on weak space-based signals, vulnerable to interference and a rapidly developing threat landscape.
There has been an increasing demand for precise time and frequency distribution in areas of particle physics, quantum networks, telecommunications, navigation, smart grids, and the finance sector. Over the past two decades, optical fibre links have demonstrated very high-performance time and frequency dissemination. White Rabbit Precision Time Protocol (WR-PTP/WR) is an Ethernet based high accuracy synchronization technology developed in 2008 at CERN as an open-source project involving multiple scientific laboratories and industrial partners. In 2020, WR was included as a “High Accuracy” option for the IEEE 1588-2019 PTP standard. WR exhibits impressive frequency instability performance with sub-nanosecond time synchronization and greatly exploits the existing telecommunication networks. It is a highly competitive and scalable optical fibre-based alternative to the widely used Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) time service. The talk will present WR technology performance, link deployments and advancements of the technology over the years and its scientific and industrial applications.
