Cost-effectivenesss of highly-accurate clocks for NTP

Mon May 16 03:12:51 UTC 2016

Joe and Eric,

It's frustrating how far public safety technology lags behind what Industry can actually deliver. It's the same in aviation. Institutions are slow to adopt new tech due to fears about reliability, and and unwillingness to take any risk at all.  So PS and aviation capabilities lag horribly. This is why commercial pilots, tired of waiting on the FAA, are buying their own tablets and running non-certified navigation tools. And police officers use cellular data connection with VPN to query wants and warrants databases. 

-mel beckman

>> On May 15, 2016, at 5:28 PM, joel jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 5/15/16 10:05 AM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>>> Mel Beckman <mel at beckman.org>:
>>> The upshot is that there are many real-world situations where
>>> expensive clock discipline is needed. But IT isn't, I don't think,
>>> one of them, with the exception of private SONET networks (fast
>>> disappearing in the face of metro Ethernet).
>> 
>> Thank you, that was very interesting information.  I'm not used to thinking
>> of IT as a relatively low-challenge environment!
>> 
>> You're implicitly suggesting there might be a technical case for
>> replacing these T1/T3 trunks with some kind of VOIP provisioning less
>> dependent on accurate time synch.  Do you think that's true?
> 
> APCO  and TETRA trunked radio  are mature systems, they do carry data,
> but are somewhat lower bandwidth. Being TDM they are dependent on
> accurate clocks.
> 
> LTE systems are used or envisioned being used for high bandwidth
> applications.
> 
> 
> 