The Time According to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)
The modern world is a small one. These days, in business you are just as likely to be communicating across the Atlantic as you are trading with you neighbour but this can cause difficulties – as anybody trying to get hold of somebody across the other-side of the world will know.
The problem, of course, is time. There are 24 time zones on Earth which means that people you may wish to talk to across the other side of the world, are in bed when you are awake – and vice versa.
Communication is not jus a problem for us humans either; much of our communication is conducted through computers and other technologies that can cause even more problems. Not just because time-zones are different but clocks, whether they are those that power a computer, or an office wall clock, can drift.
Time synchronisation is therefore important to ensure that the device you are communicating with has the same time otherwise whatever transaction you are conducting may result in errors such as the application failing, data getting lost or the machines believing an action has taken place when it has not.
Coordinated Universal Time
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is an international timescale. It pays no heed to time-zones and is kept true by a constellation of atomic clocks – accurate timepieces that do not suffer from drift.
UTC also compensates for the slowing of the Earth’s spin by adding leap seconds to ensure there is no drift that would eventually cause noon to drift towards night (albeit in many millennia; so slow is the slowing of the Earth).
Most technologies and computer networks across the globe use UTC as their source of time, making global communication more feasible.
Network Time Protocol and NTP Time Servers
Receiving UTC time for a computer network is the job of the NTP time server. These devices use Network Time Protocol to distribute the time to all technologies on the NTP network. NTP time servers receive the source of time from a number of different sources.
- The internet – although internet time sources can be insecure and unreliable
- The GPS (Global Positioning System) – using the onboard atomic clocks from navigation satellites.
- Radio signals – broadcast by national physics laboratories like NPL and NIST.
