Follow our journey to bring accurate time to the world.
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Public Time has consistently grown its global deployment footprint since the day the company formed. While that’s excellent news for us, it comes with a number of unforeseen issues as a matter of scale. With 30+ servers across the globe, it’s not enough to just make sure the server and operating system are both up […]
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While Network Time Protocol (NTP) has been in development for 34 years, time refinement has been a global cause for nearly a century. Since NTP and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) matured and computer connections have enabled global public access to these systems, it has become clearer by the decade how important it is to keep track of time. […]
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In the second half of 2017, a few months after Public Time officially became a company, we had anywhere from five to ten servers providing time. We found that our servers needed occasional maintenance but were reliable enough that we could “safely” ignore them most of the time. Our service, supported by many other surrounding […]
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Little while back (let’s face it, a long while back), I had another opportunity to visit the team out in Salt Lake. Scott and our developers are always pleasant company when working on Public Time’s objectives. And WOW, did we get some work done. First off, Scott and I slated out an entire afternoon to […]
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We’ve mentioned a few times that our cloud servers hit a speedbump around Africa due to a lack of developed infrastructure. Project: Ikenga is one of our attempts to work around that with a physical deployment. Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have all recently announced plans of cloud deployments and data centers across South Africa and the Middle […]
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Public Time’s board members once again met up to talk about the company’s accomplishments since our meeting last November, and make sure we all agreed on the company’s vision for the future. For this meeting, we bravely took on the challenge of attempting a meeting in Georgetown (those who know the area will get that […]
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November 26th, 2018 saw NASA land the Mars InSight rover—an achievement that required a thousand different, precise steps to all happen perfectly in order to succeed. A month later, on December 23rd, SpaceX successfully launched the Air Force’s first third generation GPS satellite, also known as “GPS IIIA-01” on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. […]
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PublicNTP, like many companies, is geographically distributed; the company’s four board members live in four different states. Terry lives out around D.C. but he and I met in Salt Lake after his family moved here from Maine in 1994. Kind of startling to realize he and I have known each other for a quarter of […]
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African Expansion: Project Ikenga PublicNTP has been working to improve our footprint in Africa since before the company was legally incorporated in the state of Virginia. The company has dubbed the search for improved company presence in Africa Project Ikenga, named after an African god of time. The team has found Africa a challenging place to […]
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In this final entry in the series about our open architecture stratum one server, we call out some of the future investigations we noted that may be worth looking into during the exploration so far. Multi-Constellation Multi-Frequency Indoor Reception Lowering Price There are many different avenues to improve our first iteration on this platform; these […]
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This next ‘article’ is for those tech-heads and time-nerds who are interested in setting up their own time server. We’re keeping it short on the site because, to be honest, it would be about four times longer than our next longest piece. But to those with a hankering for those juicy details, this document’s for […]
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In our previous two articles, Public Time introduced our open architecture stratum one solution, and then explained the rationale for why we embarked on the project in the first place. In this third entry in the series, we get into the technical decisions we made, and the decision points we encountered along the way to the current […]
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As posted in Public Time’s previous blog article, our team has spent many hours and meetings over the past months identifying the advantages and disadvantages of our own open architecture. We’ve looked hard at utilizing tried and true NTP servers in tandem with our own established network of stratum two and, more recently, stratum one servers. […]
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Since Public Time started in the summer of 2017, all but one of the servers we have deployed have been stratum two servers according to the Network Time Protocol. To understand what that means more fully, let’s start by explaining stratums. A stratum, in layman’s terms, is the number of “wires” between your NTP server […]
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The previous blog article about server deployment mentioned our two physical (stratum one server) deployment projects: Project Ikenga and Project Tonatiuh. Much in the same way we dove into virtual servers, we figured it would be fairly easy to find an underserved country and find a company who would lease us some power, space, and network bandwidth. […]
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As of this writing, all of PublicNTP’s deployed time servers are virtual (i.e., running in the cloud) — except for Salt Lake City, because Scott is a fan of turning things up to 11. This approach has served us well so far. It’s becoming clear that we’re reaching the point of diminishing returns for cloud […]
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The Odinani religion of the Igbo people prizes and worships spirits known as Alusi. Alusi come in many forms and serve many functions but one of the most powerful symbols/artifacts is the carved, horned Alusi known as Ikenga. There are two functions of Ikenga: A God of Achievement Ikenga represents achievement, success, human endeavor, and victory — grounded in the belief […]
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2018 was full of excitement and progress — which has provided plenty of steam for us to face the challenges that lie ahead of us in 2019. The Formalities As the year turns, it’s up to a non-profit charity to make sure its numbers and forms are all squeaky clean. Maintaining tax-exempt status requires very […]
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The calendar already shows November again — does having a time-based charity somehow make time fly by even faster? PublicNTP has its annual board meeting in November, where the directors review the changes, achievements, and progress made in the previous twelve months. As always, it was a delight to get all four board members face […]
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PublicNTP is thrilled to announce the release of our free Android app Time Server. The Time Server app is a reflection of both PublicNTP’s vision for the future and a sizeable portion of our concerted efforts in the last two years. With Time Server, you’ll be able to have and redistribute some of the most accurate […]
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A big part of keeping any company pointed in the right direction is making sure the leadership team is communicating regularly. Even though the four members of our Board of Directors are distributed across four states and two time zones, we’ve made a point to meet face to face twice since the company was founded. […]
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Network Time Protocol (NTP) remains one of the oldest and most fundamental internet protocols in use. It has provided a bedrock of reliable time for us since 1985. NTP started out rough, as all innovations do, providing us with accurate time within 100 milliseconds across the few hosts on the network. With faster computers, more […]
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In 2008, I started Public Time as a personal hobby project. Back then, Public Time consisted of a small set of cloud-based Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers, all inside the United States, that with the help of hyper-accurate time provided by atomic clocks, provided time references for computers around the world. Starting in 2016, Public […]
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It has always been about time for me. From my nascent teenager years to booting up my first cloud server under Public Time. I am proud to admit to being a time dork and I’ve always been fascinated how humanity has refined our time-measuring tools. As shown on the timeline portion of the site, you can […]
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Checklist Step 1: Hire a Law Firm That Specializes In Nonprofits (Optional) Considering neither Scott nor I had attempted to form a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation before, we retained the services of a legal firm specializing in nonprofit law to increase the odds of a smooth journey to successful incorporation and declaration of tax-exempt status for […]
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As mentioned in our source article, creating spotless financial records early on — plus supporting documentation of the financial policies — is crucial when running a tax-exempt corporation. The company is subject to audits by state or federal organizations at any point. After all, a company that’s considered a 501(c)(3) can all too easily become […]
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Public Time’s mission is to provide free, global, digital clocks. In order to become tax-exempt, avoid legal issues, and be a legitimate corporation, we needed to establish some structure to the corporation. For those considering creating your own tax-exempt corporation, all states require the application to include a description of some key formal positions that […]
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The first steps to becoming tax-exempt required we know a series of new terms that were interpreted specifically by the IRS. It was important to make sure we knew the specifics of these terms because, at first glance, some of them seem similar enough to be interchangeable. As the IRS doesn’t play in gray areas, […]
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When I first launched Public Time with a single NTP server in Chicago, Illinois, I had grand plans for rapid expansion, first across the US, to be quickly followed by exotic locations around the globe I’d always wanted to visit. As is often the case, reality ended up diverging quite a bit from the original […]