[Podcast] About time

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss the Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTP is one of the oldest systems we rely on today. It was designed and implemented by David Mills, who sadly passed away in 2024. David had been working on time synchronization since the mid-1970s and cared deeply about synchronizing the emerging ARPANET and Internet with the pre-existing global framework that governs our measurement of time, and how that framework connects to science, astronomy, and civil society.

Geoff has been reflecting on NTP, the ongoing work to secure it, and the many dependencies in the modern world on a shared, coordinated sense of time. This reliance on highly synchronized clocks cannot be overstated, it underpins almost every sector of daily life, from aircraft and space navigation to financial systems and the scheduling of events of all kinds.

Our model of time is fundamentally based on the rotation of the Earth and the length of the second. While we are now able to define the length of a second with astonishing accuracy, the Earth's rotation is not as stable as we might like. As a result, our model of time has to accommodate periodic adjustments.

To make matters worse, our model of time has been encoded over decades using differing notions of a start date, or 'epoch '. As a result, the ways in which time is represented inside machines, systems, and services are no longer consistent or unified. In many respects, it is all starting to come unstuck.

Read more about NTP, Secure NTP, and issues in Internet time on the web and the APNIC Blog:

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