North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Interesting stratum 1 NTP clock

  • From: Jerry Scharf
  • Date: Tue Jun 23 17:07:59 1998 
I know some of you have heard this rant before, but I thought I'd send it 
anyway.

I'm a time geek for many years, and used to run a popular open stratum 1 clock 
back when you had to do custom work to get 20us system clock accuracy. It 
always pained me when someone from Australia thought it was better to get time 
from my stratum 1 in the US rather than some perfectly fine stratum 2 in oz. 
NTP does well with random time packet delays, but will have errors with 
systematic differences in the out and back legs of the round trip (like 
asymmetric routing.)

I know running an antenna wire and a roof antenna is a pain, but PLEASE PLEASE 
start looking at making clocks a standard part of your infrastructure and have 
something that describes to your customers how to get time from you. The 
number of open stratum 1 clocks is just not adequate for the number of people 
that are starting to chime. With entries in the market like this, it's not 
realy a matter of cost or engineering any more.

I would be happy to talk to people about special situations they need to solve.

jerry