GMV has been awarded a £2 million contract in the UK to work on the new White Rabbit Switch. They will deliver a product which further enhances an open hardware technology for fiber-optic time distribution with functionalities essential to protect the UK’s infrastructure. The contract was awarded by Innovate UK through its quantum-enabled positioning, navigation, and timing competition. GMV is leading the development with the assistance of IQD, a clock manufacturer based in the UK. GMV thus joins the international White Rabbit community, becoming a founding member of the new White Rabbit Collaboration (www.white-rabbit.tech) recently launched by CERN.

The contract will deliver a new UK sovereign time distribution product from GMV, securing long term supply to address the clear needs of the domestic market. The product further has significant export potential to address the global problem of over dependency on vulnerable satellite signals. The GMV product will be used to augment and replace other technologies that are used in critical applications that currently depend on satellite navigation signals (GNSS) to meet their timing and synchronisation needs.

The new switch will utilise White Rabbit time distribution and synchronisation technology emerging from a joint development effort led by CERN and will contain cutting edge quantum clock technology to deliver assured and resilient time for users. 

Mark Dumville, CEO GMV, UK said: “GMV is committed to developing a portfolio of innovative products and services to ensure the UK is protected from loss of GNSS. The development team at GMV look forward to working with IUK and our industrial partners IQD and Zyxt to distribute Quantum-enabled time across UK infrastructures to ensure continuity of critical services without disruption or degradation during periods of complete loss of GNSS”.

Roger McKinlay, challenge director Quantum Technologies Innovate UK added: “In the Challenge we have been keen to fund activities across the supply chain and I am delighted to be funding a project which integrates quantum technology into a capable product from an important supplier. GMV clearly can exert the “technology pull” we have wanted to incorporate in our portfolio from the outset and which is essential for the adoption of quantum technologies."

“We very much look forward to working with GMV and IQD to deliver the new White Rabbit Switch with enhanced holdover capabilities. It’s great to have them on board, as founding members of the White Rabbit Collaboration, an initiative created to support the uptake by industry of the WR technology and foster its impact in society.” Javier Serrano, Chair of the White Rabbit Collaboration Board and co-inventor of the technology at CERN.

About the White Rabbit Collaboration and White Rabbit Technology

The project kickstarts a new collaboration between GMV and CERN, within the framework of White Rabbit Collaboration (www.white-rabbit.tech), of which GMV is a founding member. 

Launched by CERN in 2024, the White Rabbit Collaboration aims to bring stakeholders of the White Rabbit technology together to foster the uptake of the technology by industry. 

White Rabbit is an emerging open hardware technology designed for time distribution over fibre optic networks using Ethernet, independent of GNSS, offering sub-nanosecond accuracy of synchronisation. Initially developed to synchronise particle physics experiments, White Rabbit has gradually found applications in a wide variety of fields, such as synchronising arrays of antennas in radio telescopes, and providing highly accurate timestamps in stock market transactions.