A cross connect apparatus or system with transparent clocking, consistent with embodiments described herein, connects a selected source or ingress port to a selected destination or egress port and clocks data out of the selected egress port using a synthesized clock that is adjusted to match a recovered clock from the selected ingress port. A transparent clocking system may generate the synthesized clock signal with adjustments in response to a parts per million (PPM) rate detected for the associated recovered clock signal provided by the selected ingress port. The cross connect system with transparent clocking may be a 400 G cross connect system with 10 G resolution. The cross connect system with transparent clocking may be used in optical transport network (OTN) applications, for example, to provide an aggregator and/or an add-drop multiplexer (ADM) or to provide a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) upgrade to a higher data rate.