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Re: Cost-effectivenesss of highly-accurate clocks for NTP


From: Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 14 May 2016 21:39:29 +0200

On 13 May 2016 at 23:01, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl () gmail com> wrote:

Ok how many hours or days of holdover can you expect from quartz,
temperature compensated quartz or Rubidium? Should we calculate holdover as
time until drift is more than 1 millisecond, 10 ms or more for NTP
applications?

I am thinking that many available datacenter locations will have poor GPS
signal so we can expect signal loss to be common. Some weather patterns
might even cause extended GPS signal loss.



I found some data points here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oven

Assuming that acceptable drift is 10 milliseconds due that being the
expected accuracy from NTP.

The common crystal oscillator can be as bad as 1E-4 => holdover time is 2
minutes.
TCXO is listed as 1E-6 => holdover time is 3 hours.
OCXO is listed as multiple values, I will use 1E-7 => holdover time is 1
day.
Rubidium is listed as 1E-9 => 3 months
Caesium is listed as 1E-11 => 30 years
Hydrogen Maser 1E-15 => 300 millennia

I clearly need three of those maser things for my network.

Regards,

Baldur


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