At the fifth edition of the Teknowlogy Innovation Festival (https://www.teknowlogy.nl/ ) one of the key themes was “connections”. This fit perfectly with the presence of colleagues of ASTRON (https://www.astron.nl/ ) and Nikhef (https://www.nikhef.nl/ ) showcasing the White Rabbit technology (https://white-rabbit.web.cern.ch/ ), a multi-laboratory, multi-company and multinational collaboration to develop a new technology that provides a versatile solution for control and data acquisition systems.

This technology is being used in timing applications for Big Science experiments such as the neutrino telescope KM3NeT (https://www.km3net.org/ ) to synchronise the timing of detectors in a large network of systems in which Nikhef is involved and at ASTRON it is used to distribute the clock signal across the LOFAR telescope (https://www.astron.nl/telescopes/lofar/ ), which has detector elements throughout Europe.

The innovative White Rabbit time distribution protocol as originated from scientific applications, now rapidly finds its way to societal/commercial applications like telecommunications and navigation systems.