A physical layer device provides for synchronization of clocks in a communication network. A place holder for an alignment marker is inserted into a frame to be transmitted. Once the placeholder alignment marker is inserted into the frame, no additional data is added to the frame. Transmission of the frame including the placeholder alignment marker may also be delayed to allow data processing in subsequent blocks within a transmit block to complete prior to further processing of the frame including the placeholder alignment marker (e.g., timestamping, MACSec, etc.) to improve timing accuracy with a multi lane distribution environment.