As the publication of the new revision of IEEE 1588 approaches, the following blog by Doug Arnold of Meinberg, written in 2017, has an outline of what’s coming. Click here to view.

There are also links within it that are worth following to other blog entries – e.g. modular transparent clocks. The new standard will allow for clocks that take a two step message set as input and turn it into a one step output.

A couple of notes:

The new standard is currently at the sponsor ballot stage. That means that it should be published sometime next year, 2019.

The new standard, despite being touted as an upgrade to v2 and labelled as v2.1, is much longer than the current one. It’s a little over 500 pages long, compared to the 268 pages of v2. Despite that, it is backwards compatible – v2 and v2.1 devices can be mixed on a network – as long as the new features are not being used.

Eric Percival
Project Manager