Unrepeated White Rabbit Time Synchronisation over a 300 km Optical Fibre Link

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the longest unrepeated White Rabbit time synchronization over a 300 km optical fibre link, maintaining picosecond precision and sub-nanosecond accuracy, enabling scalable quantum network timing.

Contribution

It presents the first unrepeated White Rabbit deployment over 300 km, optimizing hardware and components for long-distance, high-precision time synchronization without intermediate amplification.

Findings

Achieved 99.86% uptime over 300 km link

Maintained picosecond-level precision and sub-nanosecond accuracy

Used standard telecom fibre and off-the-shelf hardware

Abstract

White Rabbit (WR) technology provides a commercially-available off-the-shelf solution for time synchronisation with sub-nanosecond accuracy and picosecond-level precision over optical fibre links typically spanning tens of kilometres. Such high-performance time dissemination can support a variety of applications, including position, navigation and timing (PNT), financial transactions, metrology, as well as entanglement and quantum key distribution (QKD). Demonstrations of WR over significantly longer distances remain few and far between, particularly in scenarios where intermediate amplification is unavailable, such as stretches of long-haul underwater fibre. In this work, we report the longest unrepeated deployment of WR to date, achieving time synchronisation over a 300 km (51.34 dB) single-span optical fibre link, even in highly asymmetrical configurations, with 99.86% uptime, whilst maintaining picosecond-level precision and sub-nanosecond accuracy. This was achieved through careful selection and optimisation of the components deployed at the link's end points. By leveraging standard telecom fibre and off-the-shelf hardware, our results pave the way for a scalable and standardised timing backbone for large-scale quantum networks, offering a practical route toward time distribution in future heterogeneous quantum communication systems.