Janet Network makes leap to high precision timekeeping with NPL
Janet, the UK’s national research and education network (NREN) is enhancing accuracy and resilience for users with NPLTime Access® from the National Physical Laboratory.
Jisc and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have joined forces to deliver resilient, precise time services to institutions over Janet, the UK’s national research and education network (NREN).
Taking its reference from the UK’s national time scale, UTC (NPL), the feed from NPL and Jisc delivers a trusted ‘common clock’ to improve accuracy for UK science, engineering and technology.
The NPLTime Access® service offers users a time signal over fibre-optic links that are traceable to coordinated universal time (UTC - the legal basis of time in the world), independent of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS). By eliminating reliance on GNSS - which can be susceptible to jamming or solar interference – it offers a significantly more resilient service.
“The faster, more complex and more integrated our members’ network infrastructures become, the more they rely on ultra-precise timing,”
Says Ben Chapman, head of architecture and engineering at Jisc.
“The UK research sector must also manage amplifying volumes of data, making synchronised time signals increasingly vital to ensure accuracy. This agreement with NPL enables us to explore how embedding NPLTime Access® into the backbone of the Janet Network can benefit UK universities and research institutions.
“Our aim is to provide Jisc members with the most accurate time services possible to support production network services and research in areas as diverse as seismologic measurement, radio astronomy, CCTV and electricity distribution – all of which rely on the most precise timing possible to ensure the accuracy of their data.”
NPLTime Access® is a highly resilient terrestrial time synchronisation service referenced to a group of commercial atomic clocks operated by NPL that have been providing the reference for precise timekeeping in the UK for over 30 years.
Elena Parsons, strategic business development manager for NPL’s commercial timing services comments:
“NPL’s collaboration with Jisc, delivering UTC(NPL) traceable time across UK academia, offers a synchronisation capability through trusted timestamps, and is a significant step toward realising a system-of-systems approach to national resiliency for time. We are looking forward to the closer engagement to support UK R&D, innovation and skills development.”
The integration of NPLTime Access® will extend and strengthen the existing Jisc network time service, which currently synchronises the computer clock times of managed devices connected to an institution’s IP network to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). With future accuracy requirements narrowing to just microseconds, the collaboration between Jisc and NPL will support the needs of the sector.
Maintaining a more consistent time reference between infrastructures also improves cyber resilience by enabling security teams to manage and protect their networks more efficiently.
Further information
An organisation should pick two to four servers to act as backup timekeepers (stratum-2 servers). These servers can still do their regular tasks, but they should be spread out in different locations within the organisation. This way, they won't all be affected should a power outage or network issue arise.
Each of these servers should connect to more than one of the Janet time servers (stratum-1) and also connect with each other to keep time in sync.