On 19 Feb, 2012, at 21:08 , Bill Woodcock wrote: > It's my assumption that some of them will be able to get enough GPS signal > (or GPS via a GSM BTS, as we also have a Sierra Wireless GSM chipset onboard) > and would thus be able to act as Stratum 1 servers for the others.
In the US I suspect all GSM base stations have GPS available (E911 support generally requires it), but I think you may find that in many (most?) other countries the GSM BTS gear has no idea what time it is. GSM doesn't require the time synchronization (it requires frequency, but they can often recover that from the tail circuit connecting the BTS to the network), so in many places they do without GPS either to save money or because the carriers are subject to regulatory requirements to avoid allowing the country's telecommunications facilities to become dependent on GPS (I assume because their regulators don't fully trust the owners of GPS)… GPS can sometimes work under non-optimum circumstances, but it sounds like you have run out of fallback options apart from trying to advance the state of the NTP art. Dennis Ferguson _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.