Telling the Time in a Global Economy – Benefits of a NTP Server

The world is becoming an ever smaller place. Modern technology means that it is just as easy to make a purchase from the other side of the world as it is buy something from our local high street.

Everything from hotels and airline tickets to jewellery and clothes can now be bought from the other side of the world with just a click of mouse.

However, such global trade is only possible thanks to accurate timing synchronisation made possible by the use of UTC time and NTP servers.

Just think next time you buy an airline ticket on the Internet, you may have bought the last seat on the plane but what would happen if moments after somebody on a computer with a slower clock tried to buy the same ticket.

Obviously the seat has been sold but not according to a computer which will check its log and could come to the conclusion that according to the clocks the original transaction happened afterwards.

This type of confusion could lead to chaos particularly with time sensitive transaction and trading such as the stock exchange where millions can be made or lost in a matter of seconds.

Fortunately the world can trade in relative security thanks to UTC and NTP servers which allow the entire world to operate under one accurate time scale.

UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) was developed after the development of atomic clocks when it was realised that the previous timescales (GMT) which were based on the movement of the earth, were not very accurate as the Earth slows in its rotation.

Instead UTC was developed which allows for adjustments in the Earths rotation by adding leap seconds. UTC deals with timezones by simply adding or subtracting hours after the time such as UTC+5  or UTC-3.

NTP (Network Time Protocol) was developed to allow computer servers to synchronise all machines on a network to the same time. NTP servers usually get their timing reference from either a specialist UTC radio transmission or via the GPS network and can synchronise all machines on that network to the same time.