RAD Receives Patent Protection for its Distributed Grandmaster Clock on an SFP

RAD, the industry pioneer of network hardware miniaturization, announced that it was issued U.S. patent 9,276,689, entitled Pluggable Packet Master Clock, on March 1, 2016. This patent covers the embedding of a primary reference time clock and an IEEE 1588 Grandmaster clock inside a small form factor pluggable (SFP) device.

RAD utilizes the patent in its MiCLK® (pronounced ’My-clock’), the world’s first fully-featured IEEE 1588 distributed Grandmaster clock on an SFP. MiCLK features a built-in GNSS receiver, a diminutive footprint, various redundancy options, and near-effortless installation. By revolutionizing the telecom market’s entire business case for timing and synchronization solutions, MiCLK enables mobile operators to inject highly accurate timing into the network much closer to base station endpoints than previously financially or logistically practical, which results in better timing accuracy. This is critical for services like LTE and LTE-A, which have increasingly stringent clocking accuracy requirements.

This new, innovative addition to RAD’s Service Assured Access solution portfolio extends RAD’s offering of patented, miniaturized solutions, which are designed to grant service providers greater control and flexibility across heterogeneous network architectures. The response from the service provider market has been, accordingly, enthusiastic.

“We’ve seen a great deal of interest in the MiCLK by Tier 1 service providers around the globe, including a recent, large deployment by a major 4G mobile operator in Asia,” states Ulik Broida, RAD’s VP of Marketing and Business Development. “Service providers recognize that the reduction in cost and complexity, coupled with significantly enhanced clock accuracy for these advanced services, presents a compelling business case.”

RAD’s patented, miniaturized solutions also include the MiNID® SFP sleeve, which instantly upgrades legacy networks with a suite of advanced performance monitoring tools. Both MiNID and MiCLK are part of RAD’s award-winning Service Assured Access (SAA) portfolio.