What is the Best Source of UTC Time?
UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the world’s global timescale and replaced the old time standard GMT (Greenwich Meantime) in the 1970’s. Whilst GMT was based on the movement of the Sun, UTC is based on the time told by atomic clocks although it is kept inline with GMT by the addition of ‘Leap Seconds’ which compensates for the slowing of the Earth’s rotation allowing both UTC and GMT to run side by side (GMT is often mistakenly referred to as UTC – although as there is no actual difference it doesn’t really matter). In computing, UTC allows computer networks all over the world to synchronise to the same time making possible time sensitive transactions from across the globe. Most computer networks used dedicated network time servers to synchronise to a UTC time source. These devices use the protocol NTP (Network Time Protocol) to distribute the time across the networks and continually checks to ensure there is no drift. The only quandary in using a dedicated NTP time server is select
