So you’ve deployed the Precision Timing Protocol (PTP) in your network. Whether for a mobile network, a power utility network, a broadcast network, a financial trading platform or more recently a Datacenter fabric – one question remains.
How do I know how good it is?
Ok, so it’s two questions – what exactly is ‘good’? At Calnex, we have spoken to multiple customers in multiple industries and the answer to the second question covers the spectrum from “dunno” to “it has to meet the ITU-T network metrics 99.999% of the time”. In other words, everything between soft woolly wool and ultra-specific.
This isn’t surprising considering the deployment of PTP particularly for phase sync is a relatively new game. Deployments are up and running but very few are problem-free. Or very few are question-free at least.
Visibility into the behaviour and assurance of the ongoing performance of PTP is interesting to some and mission critical to others. The idea is to get answers (or at the very least hints) to questions like:
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Why is my Sync alarm sometimes red sometimes green?
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Is the third party network delivering PTP quality all the time?
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I keep seeing alarms.
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Is it the network? Is it equipment X? Is it equipment Y?
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Do I really need to invest in more clocks? Do I really need to re-configure my network?
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How can I be sure that PTP continues to perform as my network evolves?
At Calnex we believe there are three flavours of visibility and assurance:
If you’d like to discuss your PTP monitoring requirements, feel free to email us at info@calnexsol.com.
Anand Ram
VP Business Development
