2018 is shaping up to be a big year for our team. With a huge rise in dense small cell deployments and 5G applications edging ever closer, operators are now facing unprecedentedly strict requirements when it comes to ensuring the levels of precision and stability needed in their synchronization networks. That's why we're innovating to meet these major challenges head on and preparing key technology announcements for the coming months.

Our solutions are perfect for addressing many of the most pressing issues. Our OSA 5405 indoor and outdoor smart GNSS and PTP grandmasters are now enabling network operators to easily synchronize indoor small cells, which are becoming key for high-throughput mobile networks. Meanwhile, our OSA 5420 range – aka the sync Swiss army knife – provides a one-box solution for overlay infrastructure with a range of requirements. With its NTP server and GNSS receiver capabilities, including multiple legacy and next-generation sync fan-out options, it's ideal for legacy architectures. The OSA 5420 Series also reduces cost even further by delivering the freedom to locate timing devices at any point.

This technology has already brought secure, highly reliable packet-based IEEE 1588 PTP timing to customers in a wide range of industries. Now though, due to the ever-expanding capacity of transport networks, there's a growing need for high-capacity, telecom-grade PTP grandmaster devices to support multiple 10Gbit/s interfaces – something no technology supplier has yet been able to offer. There's also an interesting debate going on at the moment around PTP grandmaster redundancy, and good arguments exist for both approaches: old-fashioned hardware redundancy as well as the IP method of deploying two separate units. It's clear that there are big challenges still to be addressed and that the next few months in the sync tech world will be very interesting indeed.