And people wonder why we use expensive BITS Clock systems in telecom.
It's easy to identify data centers and wire centers because of the GPS
antennas on the roof intermingled with the lightning rods.
BTW, if you ever wondered why so many of us telecom industry types
screamed bloody murder about LightSquared, that was it. The
interference was so great that it was affecting the GPS time keeping
receivers and could have absolutely devastating effects on
telecommunications.
While the holdover clocks are supposed to be good for up to 20 days
(in most cases), statistical analysis shows that with the thousands of
holdover clocks in use, the first slip will occur within 20 seconds.
Get two or three will placed slips going different directions and you
can get cascading failures that can bridge across networks.
This is the stuff that keeps some people up at night.
LightSquared was such a huge threat that it took an all out effort to
override the political favors that company was cashing in on. I know
that I personally have never seen a company so well placed that
anybody and everybody opposing them faced huge challenges in other
areas. I'm not going to come out and say that the FCC was corrupt, but
a look at some of the regulatory punishments and merger denials that
some companies have faced just might point to a pattern.
Like seriously! Take a frequency band meant for Space-to-ground
transmission, immediately next to the GPS band (where the signal
strength is somewhere just above the universe's noise floor) and
instead repurpose it to ground-to-ground transmittions with high power
transmitters. It wasn't just cheap, inexpensive unfiltered GPS units
that suffered. During the tests, it was wiping out everything and the
GPS BITS clock receivers were getting completely toasted. But that
didn't influence the regulators. It took the threat of airplanes
falling out of the sky before anybody would listen. We faced
opposition that was mind-boggling.
In almost every case, the NTP sites you are getting your clock updates
from are primary timed from a GPS timed BITS Clock system.
AG
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