NTP GPS time servers are becoming an essential tool for business networks. With the ability to synchronise hundreds of computer, switches and routers, an NTP GPS time server can keep a network accurate to within a few milliseconds of UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). (more…)

When it comes to network time synchronisation, these days, you just can’t be too careful. Accurate and secure time is essential to keep a network healthy and to avoid problems. However, getting a secure source of time is often not as easy as it sounds. Many online time sources can expose a network to vulnerabilities, such as allowing malicious code through the firewall. Furthermore, an internet time source could itself be compromised and their accuracy is never guaranteed. (more…)

Because accurate and secure time is essential for any computer network finding a time source that is both precise and secure, is an important part of keeping a network healthy. With network time sources, there are plenty of choices, but not all of them can provide the security and precision needed by the modern network. (more…)

Most of us know how useful the GPS network is. The Global Positioning System has changed the way we navigate on the road, and most modern cars are sold complete with some form of satellite navigation system already installed. However, the Global Positioning System is not only useful for satellite navigation; it has other uses too, especially as a source of accurate time for synchronising a computer network and other such technologies with the aid of a GPS network time server.

Need for Synchronisation

Time synchronisation is vital for all sorts of technologies, especially computer networks. Having different machines with a different time can lead to all sorts of untold problems, from data getting lost to simple things such as emails arriving before they were technically sent. Without accurate synchronisation or a network time server, it is nearly impossible to keep a network running smoothly and pinpoint errors and bugs.

Other technologies too need complete synchronicity. CCTV cameras, cash machines and safety systems such as air traffic control all have to be precisely synchronised. Imagine the chaos if your local cash machine told a different time from the one next to it. In effect, you could withdraw money from one machine, while the one next to it would consider a transaction that hadn’t happened yet, allowing you to withdraw the same amount again.

GPS Time

The Global Positioning System doesn’t actually transmit any positioning information. The reason that satellite navigational systems can work out accurate positioning is due to the time signals that the GPS satellites transmit. Onboard each GPS satellite is a couple of atomic clocks. These clocks transmit their times and exact position of the satellite and it’s this information, triangulated from three or more satellites that a navigational system uses to work out exactly where it is in the world.

Atomic clocks have to be used for this process because the signals are travelling at the speed of light. A one-second inaccuracy in the time signal would lead a satellite navigational system to be in error of over 300,000 km. And it’s a testament to the atomic clocks on GPS satellites that most sat nav systems are accurate to within a few metres.

GPS Network Time Server

Because of the accuracy of the GPS time signals, and the fact that the signal are available anywhere on the planet, the GPS network is ideal for use as a master time source for computer network time synchronisation. To synchronise a computer network or other technology systems to GPS time, all that is required is a GPS network time server.

GPS network time servers do all the work for you. By use of a rooftop antenna, the time server receives the GPS signal and distributes it around a network of machines. By use of time synchronisation protocols such as NTP (Network Time Protocol), all devices can be kept within a few milliseconds of the original GPS time source. And you don’t need multiple time servers for large networks either. A single device can synchronise hundreds of devices to GPS time.

GPS network time servers are simple to install, simple to use and can maintain millisecond accuracy for all sorts of technologies. Used by organisations as diverse as stock exchanges, air traffic control and banking systems, GPS time servers provide an efficient and cost effective solution to maintain network synchronicity.

GPS time servers are a highly accurate and secure method of synchronising a computer network to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). GPS time servers are simple to use and ensure a network is synchronised to s secure form of time. However, many network administrators don’t see the need to use a GPS time server and continue to put their network at risk by using an online source of time for synchronisation. Here are five reasons why a GPS time server is crucial for computer network synchronisation. (more…)

Time synchronisation is something easily taken for granted in this day and age. With GPS NTP servers, satellites beam down time to technologies, which keeps them synced to the world’s time standard UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

Picture: Ruth Belville the Greenwich Time Lady

Before UTC, before atomic clocks, before GPS, keeping time synchronised was not so easy. Throughout history, humans have always kept track of time, but accuracy was never that important. A few minutes or an hour or so difference, made little difference to people’s lives throughout the medieval and regency periods; however, come the industrial revolution and the development of railways, factories and international commerce, accurate timekeeping became crucial.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became time standard in 1880, taking over from the world’s first time standard railway time, developed to ensure accuracy with railway timetables. Soon, all businesses, shops and offices wanted to keep their clocks accurate to GMT, but in an age before electrical clocks and telephones, this proved difficult.

Enter the Greenwich Time Lady. Ruth Belville was a businesswoman from Greenwich, who followed in her father’s footsteps in delivering time to businesses throughout London. The Belville’s owned a highly accurate and expensive pocket watch, a John Arnold chronometer originally made for the Duke of Sussex.

Every week, Ruth, and her father before her, would take the train to Greenwich where they would synchronise the pocket watch to Greenwich Mean Time. The Belvilles would then travel around London, charging businesses to adjust their clocks their chronometer, a business enterprise that lasted from 1836 to 1940 when Ruth finally retired at the age of 86.

BY this time, electronic clocks had began to take over traditional mechanical devices and were more accurate, needing less synchronisation, and with the telephone speaking clock introduced by the General Post Office (GPO) in 1936, timekeeping services like the Belville’s became obsolete.

Today, time synchronisation is far more accurate. Network time servers, often using the computer protocol NTP (Network Time Protocol), keep computer networks and modern technologies true. NTP time servers receive an accurate atomic clock time signal, often by GPS, and distribute the time around the network. Thanks to atomic clocks, NTP time servers and the universal timescale UTC, modern computers can keep time to within a few milliseconds of each other.

The physics world got itself into a bit of a tizz this month as scientists at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, found an anomaly on one of their experiments, which seemed to show that some particles were travelling faster than light.

Time server's can provide atomic clock accuracy

Faster than light travel for any particle is prohibited of course, according to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, but the OPERA team at CERN, who fired neutrinos around a particle accelerator, travelling for 730 km, found that the neutrinos travelled the distance 20 parts per million faster than photons (light particles) meaning they broke Einstein’s speed limit.

While this experiment could prove to be one of the most important discoveries in physics, physicists are remaining sceptical, suggesting that a cause could be an error generated in the difficulties and complexities of measuring such high speeds and distances.

The team at CERN used GPS time servers, portable atomic clocks and GPS positioning systems to make their calculations, which all provided accuracy in distance to within 20cm and an accuracy of time to within 10 nanoseconds. However, the facility is underground and the GPS signals and other data streams had to be cabled down to the experiment, a latency the team are confident they took into account during their calculations.

Physicists from other organisations are now attempting to repeat the experiments to see if they get the same results. Whatever the outcome, this type of groundbreaking research is only possible thanks to the accuracy of atomic clocks that are able to measure time to millionths of a second.

To synchronise a computer network to an atomic clock you don’t need to have access to a physics laboratory like CERN as simple NTP time servers like Galleons NTS 6001 will receive an accurate source of atomic clock time and keep all hardware on a network to within a few milliseconds of it.

Most of us recognise how long an hour, a minute, or a second is, and we are used to seeing our clocks tick past these increments, but have you ever thought what governs clocks, watches and the time on our computers to ensure that a second is a second and an hour an hour?

Early clocks had a very visible form of clock precision, the pendulum. Galileo Galilei was the first to discover the effects of weight suspended from a pivot. On observing a swinging chandelier, Galileo realised that a pendulum oscillated continuously above its equilibrium and didn’t falter in the time between swings (although the effect weakens, with the pendulum swinging less far, and eventually stops) and that a pendulum could provide a method of keeping time.

Early mechanical clocks that had pendulums fitted proved highly accurate compared to other methods tried, with a second able to be calibrated by the length of a pendulum.

Of course, minute inaccuracies in measurement and effects of temperature and humidity meant that pendulums were not wholly precise and pendulum clocks would drift by as much as half an hour a day.

The next big step in keeping track of time was the electronic clock. These devices used a crystal, commonly quartz, which when introduced to electricity, will resonate. This resonance is highly precise which made electric clocks far more accurate than their mechanical predecessors were.

True accuracy, however, wasn’t reached until the development of the atomic clock. Rather than using a mechanical form, as with a pendulum, or an electrical resonance as with quartz, atomic clocks use the resonance of atoms themselves, a resonance that doesn’t change, alter, slow or become affected by the environment.

In fact, the International System of Units that define world measurements, now define a second as the 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium atom.

Because of the accuracy and precision of atomic clocks, they provide the source of time for many technologies, including computer networks. While atomic clocks only exist in laboratories and satellites, using devices like Galleon’s NTS 6001 NTP time server.

A time server such as the NTS 6001 receives a source of atomic clock time from either GPS satellites (which use them to provide our sat navs with a way to calculate position) or from radio signals broadcast by physics laboratories such as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Time) or NPL (National Physical Laboratory).

Accurate time is one of the most important aspects to keeping a computer network secure and safe. Places such as stock exchanges, banks and air traffic control rely on secure and accurate time. As computers rely on time as their only reference for when events happen, a slight error in a time code could lead to all sorts of errors, from millions being wiped off share prices to aeroplane flight paths being incorrect.

GPS time signals are secure

And time doesn’t just need to be accurate for these organizations, but secure too. A malicious user who interferes with a timestamp could cause all sorts of trouble, so ensuring time sources are both secure and accurate is vital.

Security is increasingly important for all sorts of organisations. With so much trade and communication conducted over the internet, using a source of accurate and secure time is as important a part of network security as anti-virus and firewall protection.

Despite the need for accuracy and security, many computer networks still rely on online time servers. Internet sources of time are not only unreliable, with inaccuracies commonplace, and distance and latency affecting the precision, but an Internet time server is also unsecure and able to be hijacked by malicious users.

But an accurate, reliable and completely secure source of time is available everywhere, 365 days a year—GPS.

While commonly thought of as a means of navigation, GPS actually provides an atomic clock time code, direct from the satellite signals. It is this time code that navigation systems use for calculating position but it is just as effective to provide a secure time stamp for a computer network.

Organizations that rely on accurate time for safety and security all use GPS, as it is a continuous signal, that never goes down, is always accurate and can’t be interfered with by third parties.

To utilise GPS as a source of time, all that is required is a GPS time server. Using an antenna, the time server receives the GPS signal, while NTP (Network Time Protocol) distributes it around the network.

GPS time server

With a GPS time server, a computer network is able to maintain accuracy to within a few milliseconds of the atomic clock time signal, which is translated into UTC time (Coordinated Universal Time) thanks to NTP, ensuring the network is running the same accurate time as other networks also synchronised to a UTC time source.

The UK speaking clock has been around for nearly eighty years. It was started in 1936 when time keeping started to become more important to people’s lives. Initially available only in the London it was rolled out to the whole country during World War II.

There have been four people that have had honour of providing the permanent voice to the speaking clock over the last 70. And over 70 million calls are made to the speaking clock making it an important from of accurate time but have you ever wondered how accurate it is and where the time comes from and how accurate it is?

The speaking clock is controlled by a major British telecoms company who took over the General Post Office (GPO) and the time was originally supplied by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) who also provide the MSF signal that NTP time servers use as a source of atomic clock synchronisation.

NPL no longer help with the speaking clock but the time is still controlled by NTP servers, either GPS or MSF, which ensures that the time you hear on the end of the telephone is accurate.

NTP servers are also commonly used by computer networks to ensure that IT systems, from traffic light signals to the office PC are all running an accurate form of time.

NTP time servers can either receive the MSF radio signal broadcast by NPL or, more commonly now, GPS signals beamed directly from space.

Often network administrators opt to use online NTP servers that send time signals over the internet but these are not as accurate and cause security problems so it is far better to have a dedicated NTP time server to control the time if you wish to have a computer network that is running accurately.