This year’s ITSF was the biggest ever – and I’ve been attending since 2005. We had more operators presenting their experiences and plans, and more industries outside of Telecoms – finance, power, broadcast, and automotive. It was good to see BMW presenting here as the first ever ITSF presentation on timing for in-car networks.

There were also several exhibitors present that I wasn’t aware of before, such as Quartzlock and ElecSPN (both oscillator companies), Bodet (a 19th century French watch and clock company, who have evolved into developing systems to ensure all the clocks in a building such as a railway station read the correct time) and Helix (a company making GNSS antennas).

As someone who is a regular attendee at this event, I met lots of people I already know, but there were also a lot of new people here too.

To pick out a couple of papers from the conference that were interesting: Xilinx has a paper on measuring on-chip latency for use in creating accurate timestamps. Calnex’s work in designing products to measure system performance also has value in device performance. Turk Telekom had a presentation on PTP for their broadcast network that got everyone talking because of its performance. This was a system Calnex was involved in measuring a few months back. White Rabbit (or IEEE1588 High Accuracy) was mentioned several times, so will be a technology to watch for the future.

Check out out my last three blogs below, or ask me a question on this one!

Tim Frost
Strategic Technology Manager