I have an unstable device clock on my Dante network – why is this?

There are a range of network conditions that can interfere with a device’s clock stability. These include:

• A switch on the network is configured to use Energy Efficient Ethernet (‘Green Ethernet’) functionality
• A 100 Mb switch or link is present where a Gigabit connection is required
• One or more switches are incorrectly configured
• A ‘problematic’ external word clock is being used as the leader clock

Clock instability is often a result of overloaded network links. As a rule of thumb, total bandwidth utilisation (including multicast and unicast) on any given link should not exceed 70% of the supported bandwidth for that link. Utilisation above 70% of supported bandwidth can adversely impact clock synchronization (especially if there is also non-Dante traffic on the network).