Quoted markets can be intemperate places, prone at times to short-sightedness. Large listed companies have greater buffer zones to absorb the blows that come with being a publicly-owned business, their smaller counterparts less so.

The world’s three major quoted makers of network testing equipment – Spirent, Keysight and Viavi, with market capitalisations ranging from two to tens of billions – have all reported easing spending by customers amid fears of an economic slowdown. Scotland’s AIM-listed Calnex is not immune to prevailing global market conditions.

Linlithgow-based Calnex doesn’t have the financial might of its larger rivals, but chief executive Tommy Cook believes the company has other technical advantages.

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“The big players all have monitoring systems, but when you come to timing it’s a different world,” he said. “Most other things with monitoring you get a simple [answer] – an interface is working or it’s not working, the equipment will tell you if it is broken.

“With timing you don’t get pass/fail, you just get a load of parameters and you have to try and interpret them to figure out whether that means it’s working or not, and that really is our edge. Because we are seen as the synch experts, we can interpret these parameters better than anyone else.”

Mobile phone applications increasingly require low latency – the time that data takes to transfer across a network – to maximise the user experience. To achieve this, operators are moving their data to what are known as “edge” locations: data centres in sites that are closest to the end-user, delivering content quickly.

This creates issues with network efficiency and an increasing requirement for synchronisation of servers within the data centres run by hyperscale providers of computing and data storage such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

READ MORE: Calnex tumbles as slower growth hits global telecoms investment

Also ranking among the world’s largest hyperscalers is Meta, which operates 18 data centre campuses around the globe in support of its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger services. Calnex is working with Meta, which is currently overhauling the design of its data centres to cope with the additional processing power required by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Mr Cook said that deal with Meta was three years in the making. Meanwhile, other hyperscalers are reportedly evaluating whether they too will go down the synchronisation route.

“What timing does is make the infrastructure more efficient and more effective, so hopefully that will give us a way in as all the other data centre companies realise the value of time synchronising their servers to one another,” he said.