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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Standalone Stratum 1 NTP Server
Hmm... $2400 is still in the "pricey" range to be throwing out bunches of these across a network in wide distribution. (Pardon me if some of you on the list snicker at my reluctance at the $2400 price - for some of us the "new, new Econcomy" is making things like NTP Stratum 1 clocks a luxury that The Budgeters doesn't see as necessary, since it's an invisible engineering issue.) One would think that a vendor could come up with a 1u rackmount box with a GPS and single-board computer (BSD or Linux-based) for ~$500 total cost. Add 150% for profit and distribution costs, you're still in the $1300 range, which is more reasonable. I suppose my oversimplification is the reason I'm not in the hardware business. I'd be even happier with a PCI-bus card that I could put into an old (reasonably fast) PC and a CD-ROM with an OpenBSD distribution that automatically did the Right Thing. There is a case to be made about off-the-shelf PC hardware not being accurate enough to handle a true Stratum-1 clock, and that is a valid point. However, if I can get within .5ms, I'm happy since most of my applications don't require anything more accurate than that. (Those of you timing T1's should use the more expensive systems.) I will go out on a limb and say that a reduction in the cost of stratum-1 servers will increase their use across the Internet. The results of such an increase would be arguably visible, as the current multi-layer timekeeping system seems to be more-or-less keeping clocks correct to the point of usefulness, at least from a layer-4-and-up standpoint. However, accuracy and self-determination for timing are probably things that most organizations would consider "good" by self-evidence, and the lower the price the more possible things become to implement. Perhaps there are reasons that putting stratum-1 clocks in many, many places is sub-optimal; I leave that for others to illuminate. I know that I would like to not rely on POP-external network connections to keep my clock sources accurate, but these prices (while very inexpensive, compared to other stratum-1 sources I have seen) are still outside the "put-one-in-every-POP" price. JT At 9:48 AM -0700 8/27/02, Mike Lyon wrote: Here is your base pricing from Truetime: NTS-150 $2395 NTS-200 $3595 -Mike On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, John Todd wrote:Happen to know what the base price is for these? "Low price" is a
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