In order to understand / manage any risks associated with deploying the latest 1588/PTP and SyncE technologies it is paramount that the old and new are benchmarked. Once the system and equipment performance requirements are clearly understood plans for the field evaluation of the new technologies.

The evaluation of 1588/PTP performance with real network traffic (not just simulated) is a critical step before rollout in to a commercial network. Performance can be compared to that seen in the lab with simulated traffic and failure conditions.

It is important to understand how sync. performance is changing over time as it scales up. By monitoring performance at key parts of the network from “day 1” it is possible to identify early areas of the network where performance is changing and may cause service outages.

The total cost of ownership of networks is a concern to all network operators. A test and monitoring solution that provides a flexible hardware probe that operates with different applications to suit the task at hand only serves to ensure fast identification and speedy resolution of issues with the minimum of engineering resource.