It sounds like GPS, and thus a GPS-based stratum 1 server, uses these time servers, but they were successfully failed over:
> Jeff finished off the email mentioning the US GPS system failed over successfully to the WWV-Ft. Collins campus. So again, for almost everyone, there was zero issue, and the redundancy designed into the system worked like it's supposed to.
So failures in these systems are potentially correlated.
The author mentions another solution. Apparently he runs his own atomic clock. I didn’t know this was a thing an individual could do.
> But even with multiple time sources, some places need more. I have two Rubidium atomic clocks in my studio, including the one inside a fancy GPS Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO). That's good for holdover. Even if someone were jamming my signal, or my GPS antenna broke, I could keep my time accurate to nanoseconds for a while, and milliseconds for months. That'd be good enough for me.
The CSACs that I have in a couple devices are 'atomic', and use Rubidium, but they're a bit lower accuracy than Cesium clocks [1] or Hydrogen Masers [2].
There are a few folks on the time-nuts mailing list who own such exotic pieces of hardware, but those are pretty far out of reach for most!
Atomic clocks cover a pretty big range of performance nowadays. You can pick up a used but serviceable rubidium frequency reference for a few hundred dollars but the difference between it and the top of the line clocks is almost as big as the difference between a it and a good pendulum clock.
Be aware that there are members of the NTP pool with less-than-honorable intentions and you don't get to pick-and-choose. Yes, they all should provide the time, but they also get your IP address.
For example: unlike the IPv4 space, the IPv6 space is too big too scan, so a number of "researchers" (if you want to call them that) put v6-capable NTP servers in the NTP pool to gather information about active v6 blocks to scan/target.
Is this one of those extraordinary claims that requires evidence? Or is it generally true that there are homey-pots in many of these services (NTP, mirrors, etc)
Shareholders demand it, even. If your costs increased but your profits stayed constant after your price increase, then a small business owner might be perfectly happy with that. But it's a decline in profit margin so investors would go ballistic.
$120 per month is well within the range of most monthly internet plans. The article doesn't say how much monthly service for this county-driven initiative will cost. Yes, there's an upfront cost (though cable providers typically have a hookup too) but it's not huge in comparison to monthly fees.
We got starlink for our rural property. We were previously paying over $200 a month for vastly inferior service (long range Wi-Fi), much slower and dropped out all the time.
If you can get a wired connection, get it. Starlink is for people who can't, and it's far and away the best option for those people.
I wrote "many." And, yes, many people do not have good wired Internet access and paying a relatively small premium to get the equivalent of wired broadband access at all is worth it for a great many of those people. No one is asking you to pay if you have better options.
After seeing this happen time and time again, it's kind of a wild decision to make. So many negative reviews I see these days are about performance issues.
You would think a little more time would be put into reaching at least some reasonable performance level.
> So many negative reviews I see these days are about performance issues.
Unfortunately, negative publicity from bad performance doesn't really stop these games from selling well, as proven by most AAA releases in the past few years.
Skylines isn't an AAA release though. And the first game was only really successful because the prior sim city was full of user hostile changes. The new game similarly banks on the accumulated positive image of the first one. To risk all that with a user hostile, awfully optimized early release is a risky game to play.
The studio already killed a series once with a bad second entry, cities in motion 2...
You still can...
If you're that considered about 5 microseconds: Build your own Stratum 1 time server https://github.com/geerlingguy/time-pi
or just use ntppool https://www.ntppool.org/en/