I got into this field of Network Synchronization or NetSync for about 3 years during the late 1990s and exited this field of specialization for close to 20 years before I come back to it again.

I started off my career as an Application Engineer in Hewlett-Packard or HP, way back in 1995. It was actually a technical support engineer role in a Sales team for the test & measurement products, which was later spun off as Agilent Technologies and later Keysight of today.

During the period of 1997 to 1999, I was assigned to support Net Sync products and consultancy for the Malaysia and AP regional customers, handling sync equipment such as cesium clock, GPS, SSU, sync tester and sync audit.

During mid-90s and early 2000, many of the traditional PSTN operators in Asia, who used to own and operate microwave PDH for their long-haul transmission network, started to invest heavily into optical fibre network and the new SDH transmission technology. At the same time, those analog mobile network operators (1G) also started to migrate into the new 2G digital cellular network technology or GSM. GSM network was also dependent on the SDH technology as the backhaul transmission, either using microwave or fiber optics as the transmission medium.

After putting up all these digital and high speed (at that time) equipment into place, one of the most problematic technicality which was new to most of these network operators, was the net sync issue! How to sync up the frequency and timing for all these distributed network nodes that are interconnected in whatever topology, so there were no slips, no dropped calls, no failed connection sessions, no error bursts, no loss-of-sync, etc.

I was personally involved in some sync equipment installation & commissioning projects, network sync testing, sync audit & analysis/report preparation, plus the pre-sales support. I also conducted network sync training classes, for both technology introduction, and product training, to the customers.

Back than, I used to joke with my friends that I put a BMW in the car booth of my old PROTON Wira (a Malaysia national car). A BMW car price was probably 5-8 times of a PROTON car in Malaysia. I used to carry around a HP5071A cesium clock in my car booth and travel around Malaysia to either do product demo, or conduct sync audit or timing/frequency testing. It was used as a precision frequency reference. I was told every GPS satellite up in the earth orbit carried 3 units of HP5071A cesium clock as a fully redundant timing & frequency reference clock source for the GPS system to work! GPS not only can give you the precise location data (your longitudes, latitudes and altitudes) but the precise time (YY:MM:DD-HH:MM:SS) and the 10MHz frequency! 

Ever since, I have kept in my collection, both electronic and printed copies of all related materials and documents, over the years. Luckily, I didn’t throw away these stuffs in the boxes when I moved house sometime back.

During the Chinese New Year house-cleaning early this year, I was given the last warning by my wife, either I give away boxes of these rubbish, or she will trash it into the dustbin. I took a look at these dusty stuffs, and to my surprise, I can still recall and understand all those technical knowledge I gained during that 3-years work with Net Sync. I googled on the latest happening & trends for net sync market. Again, to my surprise, nothing much change, everything I have learnt still applicable, probably now people talk more on net sync challenge for 5G, or the advantages of new PTP over the old NTP for the IP network timing sync challenge. I was so glad I didn’t erase my Net Sync memory from my brain-SSD. Data was successfully recovered from the Time Machine,

Scanning the hard copies of old documents into PDF, converting the graphics to texts using OCR and putting all these things up in a nice website took some efforts and time. But it was worth it. Plus the fact that other than Net Sync, I have just picked up another new skill - creating, designing and writing for website, without any programming or graphic skills required.

So, that’s my story for creating this website. Hope it will be beneficial to the engineers, or anyone else who is curious about how timing and frequency works - the Second and the Hertz.