Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

The British government is to pour £180 million into ensuring the UK keeps up with the times. Don't worry, it's not another cringeworthy effort to get down with the kids by putting Keir Starmer on TikTok. Rather, DSIT is funneling the cash toward the National Physical Laboratory's (NPL) National Timing Centre (NTC) to continue …

[Aladdin Sane]

What is this cesium of which you speak?

I'm familiar with caesium though.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

Ask your local cesar, he may let you in his cesium!

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

Any more of this and I'll start using digraphs in public.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

Is this the right locative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

I see your pedantry and raise...

Caesium (IUPAC spelling; [9] also spelled cesium in American English)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

EU Language Sovereignty.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

There is no such thing as American English. There is the King's English and there are mistakes.

[Ken Shabby]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

Same goes for Cheese

[rg287]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

I’m not sure I want to know about the King’s Cheese.

[phuzz]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

You can get it from Waitrose, apparently it's good.

(Although presumably this business has now passed to William as the current Duke of Cornwall? The Dutchy of Cornwall is in an odd legal position; sometimes it acts like a normal private business, and sometimes asserts Crown immunity to prosecution, which theoretically would allow Wills to avoid all sorts of laws, even including the Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act 1998.)

[HMcG]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

King Charles did rather miserably at school, particularly in English. So it’s definitely not his.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is. He inherited it from his mother.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the King's English

WTF? He's German.

So's the rest of the House of Saxe-Cobug Gotha.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: There is the King's English

> WTF? He's German.

NO HE IS NOT. His father had to run from the German authorities or he might have been imprisoned. But DT is pure 110% American made in every aspect. So sorry, that is on USA alone, don't point the finger at others like DT.

[phuzz]

Re: There is the King's English

OP was talking about King Charles, who comes from a family that these days uses the name of the House of Windsor, but before that they were the House of Saxe-Cobug Gotha.

Of course, the royal family have been residents in the UK for many generations, and all the European royal families were so inbred they're practically all related (eg the King of Sweden is a fourth cousin to Chrales, and is in the line of succession for the British crown, although he'd have to bump off around two hundred people to become king).

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: There is the King's English

Wait until people find out about Anglo-Saxons.

[Grey Bird]

Re: There is the King's English

DTs grandfather was German (ad fled Germany to avoid compulsory military service) and his mother was Scots and both were immigrants to the US. So according to some things he's said, he's not 100% American.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: There is the King's English

We don't want him back.

[David Hicklin]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

I sent a correction in the to other day, they corrected the word salad but not the spelling mistake !

[FIA]

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

What is this cesium of which you speak?

It used to be called mrdogism.

[FirstTangoInParis]

160 million years….

For those living in the sticks, this is a perfectly normal interval between busses.

[Vikingforties]

Re: 160 million years….

160 million years - we'll be squashed into the next supercontinent, Pangaea Proxima, by then. It's possible some other country's bus service could have come along in the meantime.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: 160 million years….

Not true. In parts of Somerset they don't have bus services because the last bus driver was accused of witchcraft for having a horseless carriage.

[Ian Mason]

Re: 160 million years….

And thanks to the backlog in the courts he is still waiting for a trial date.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: 160 million years….

Did he weigh more, or less than a duck?

[Anonymous Coward]

This actually seems like a sensible initiative for once.

[Peter Gathercole]

How accurate to busses have to be?

Funnily enough, for a majority of requirements, the MSF radio time signal broadcast from Anthorn is good enough (although does not achieve the end point accuracy of atomic clocks). But there are people who go to the trouble of working out the propagation delay due to distance, so they must believe that it is possible to get significant accuracy from this system.

I did think thar Rugby, being more central to the country was a better location for this than Anthorn in Cumbria. But we could do with another broadcast location.

Most of the consumer grade off-the-shelf radio controlled clocks actually sync to the DCF77 time source from Mainflingen in Germany, as do any Meinberg radio controlled NTP appliances, however.

[werdsmith]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

Rugby is central to the weight of population, but as regards GB when considering Shetland then Rugby is Anglocentric only.

[werdsmith]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

Anyway, been up the M1 to just before the M6 ext and seen the site of the old antenna farm? Wind turbines, warehouses, new housing and mud where something new is being built.

Where there is fields there is still guy-line anchors to be seen.

That was always something for me to look out for on our trips to the Lake District in my childhood.

[DS999]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

Yes within a minute is probably good enough, because the vagaries of traffic will often shift schedules by more than that. Within a second is massive overkill.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

A huge number of things need time accurate to the second or better these days.

[David Hicklin]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

> A huge number of things need time accurate to the second or better these days.

Then time looses all meaning when you are retired as "Ah, tomorrow will do"

[Arthur the cat]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

Then time looses all meaning when you are retired as "Ah, tomorrow will do"

In my experience it's more "Fuck! Is it Friday already? Where'd the week go??"

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

When you get older "Fuck! My birthday already? Where'd the year go??"

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

MSF has sub-second accuracy, and the edge(s) of the final synchronising pulse is probably accurate to a millisecond or less (I used to know, memory is failing). The whole time 'packet' takes a minute to transmit, true, but it is the final pulse that actually signals the point in time to sync to.

A correctly configured MSF radio clock should wait for three consecutive good time packets before setting their internal clock.

[Anonymous Coward]

depending on MSF

And what do those clocks do when MSF is switched off? Which happens too often. It also goes away for a fortnight's holiday in the summer FFS.

https://www.npl.co.uk/products-services/time-frequency/msf-radio-time-signal

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How accurate to busses have to be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_Radio_Station

Decommissioned.

Warehousing now with an expansion to DIRFT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daventry_International_Rail_Freight_Terminal

Emergency Services BT/Cellnet//O2 Airwave project was based there until it moved to a new building in 2009 nearby as part of Macquarie (boo-hiss acquisition) and eventual disposal to Motorola.

[R Soul]

Rugby, being more central to the country

If wikipedia is to be believed (I know, I know), the most northerly point of the UK is at 60 degrees N in the Shetland Islands and the most southerly is at 49.5 degrees N in the Scilly Isles. The mid-point between them is around 55 degrees N. That's approximately the latitude of Glasgow or Edinburgh. These cities are some 500km or so north of the supposedly "more central" Rugby.

BTW, having another broadcast location would complicate the problems of compensating for propagation delay. Unless you're equidistant from all the transmitters.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Rugby, being more central to the country

Shirley in you need a machine that goes ping for a new Atomic Clock, reutilise existing infrastructure that is nigh on ubiquitous and perhaps needing protection from tossers wanting to turn it off.

DTV (Freeview)

DAB

2G GPRS/telemetry or the (sucks ass) SmartMeter comms.

Conscious what you could doing the early 80’s with a BBC Micro and Teletext Adapter or (analogue) broadcast Basicode..

[Anonymous Coward]

…. Yeah but (at the start) £180m worth ??

[Christoph]

"using state-of-the-art cesium clocks; so accurate that it would take 160 million years for them to drift by just one second."

That's not the time keeping state-of-the-art! The current state of the art is around one second in 30 billion years - longer than the current age of the Universe. And they're working on a way to make them ten times more accurate.

[BartyFartsLast]

It might not be timekeeping state of the art, but it will be state of the art for Caesium clocks.

And it will be better than the Caesium clock iny shed (yes, really, I have one n my shed and it's still got Caesium)

[john.jones.name]

Nope there is a rfc and get in line...

we are already on this

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-03/nts.html

get a clue stop this time space and QZ are not needed we can do it from land

get on it

[elsergiovolador]

Time

Just about time for some good news.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: Time

I second this

[Snowy]

Re: Time

Sadly if you give it another minute some bad news will come along.

[Korev]

Re: Time

What are you saying about hour country?

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Re: Time

Don't get upset, when day are rude to you.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Time

That was a week pun

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: Time

It belonged to another era but it will stand the test of time.

[Korev]

Re: Time

You'll need to clock face up to it

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Time

You might not get any good news for ages, the lots turns up all at once.

[Korev]

Re: Time

Atto boy!

[cd]

Re: Time

Just a wind-up...

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Why the mocking title?

This is not about Waymo, this is about the timescale below nanoseconds. Like the time it takes for Waymo to deduct the money.

[Anonymous Coward]

nationally distributed?

Will that mean England and Wales or will it extend to Scotland?

(I assume Northern Ireland will remain in the 1960's regardless).

[Snowy]

Re: nationally distributed?

Some parts of England are looking forward to the start of the Victorian era...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: nationally distributed?

I did live in mid-Somerset for a while.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: nationally distributed?

Non UK person here: Please explain the reference (and why someone votes down?) to me...

[Rivalroger]

Limey internal prejudices

Somerset is a county in SW England. It has a reputation for being a rather "backwoods" area. When I lived in Canada they would make jokes about Newfoundland. I think people south of the 49th think about Louisiana in a similar way.

Although I would never live there now, I used to live outside Taunton which is the county town (kind of a state capital) in Somerset and it was pleasant enough apart from a pub called the Plough where the farmers would drink what they had made form selling their stock at Taunton market and things would get a bit lively.

[Anonymous Coward]

typo

should read "1690's"

[only1effin]

Didn’t we used to do this whole time distribution thing with just one Longwave transmitter at Droitwich ?

[R Soul]

IIUC, that transmitter didn't do time signals: just the pips on Radio 4 before broadcasting The Archers to a grateful(?) planet.

Long wave transmissions from Droitwich look doomed anyway. The BBC has or will soon stop LW broadcasting. The transmitters need valves(!) which are no longer being made.

[David Hicklin]

It all started with Railway Time, until then everyone used Local Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this really necessary?

Perhaps I don't understand, but Europe has Galileo GNSS and need not rely on the Americans for GPS. Is that insufficient?

Also, if Europe's GNSS is insufficient, then why isn't this a Europe-wide initiative? Accurate timekeeping is really important, and also something which scales well.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Is this really necessary?

In terms of someone turning it off in a fit of political pique, yes.

However, there could be other situations where a lot of satellites are lost (Carrington event part deux, atom bomb in orbit, etc) that impact all, and also they all share the same band of RF frequencies so local jamming of all systems is a risk for some critical users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is this really necessary?

Can the UK not rely on Europe for this? (legitimately asking)

This seems like the sort of thing ripe for pan-European cooperation.

[brainwrong]

Re: Is this really necessary?

I think it more likely that europe can't rely on the uk.

Besides, an independent alternative is a good thing.

[rg287]

Re: Is this really necessary?

Every country (of a certain size. Leichtenstein & Monaco less so) ought to have a robust timing capability, so no great coordination needed there. We already have a good capability but a distributed network is no bad thing. £180m is a noddy sum to Government given the chaos that would ensue from time drift (the NHS in England & Wales spends >£350m/day).

What would need more coordination would be rolling out something like eLORAN to lighthouses/nav points as a terrestrial fallback from GNSS. Trinity House discontinued their eLORAN trials in 2015, alongside partners in France and Norway. They knocked off their DGPS network in 2022 on the basis multi-constellation GNSS and RAIM (Receiver autonomous integrity monitoring) were adequate. In the scheme of things, the cost of a dozen DGPS and eLORAN base stations is trivial as a backup to satellite systems.

[Ian Mason]

Re: Is this really necessary?

You seem to be thinking about withdrawal of one GNSS satellite constellation rather than jamming or spoofing of all of them. GPS, GALILEO, and GLONASS all operate on exactly the same downlink frequency.

[R Soul]

Re: Is this really necessary?

"Also, if Europe's GNSS is insufficient, then why isn't this a Europe-wide initiative?"

In a word, Brexit. The UK left the Galileo project when it left the EU.

[jcday]

Quantum

Quantum lattice or quantum gas clocks are something like a thousand times more accurate than the best nuclear clocks. This is accurate enough to be able to measure time dilation differences over a few feet in change of height

In terms of GPS equivalent, you could tell position to within a few centimetres. That might sound useless to you, but I could imagine that trying to navigate a smoke-filled room to reach an emergency exit, a few cm versus a few metres might make a big difference.

Or, for construction work or archaeology, if you're looking to avoid a gas pipe, a few metres out can be the difference between the hole in the ground you want and a much bigger hole in the ground you don't want.

If you're going to be building the next gen clock, it does not make sense to be making the smallest possible increment. At that cost, go for the very best you can do.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Quantum

> navigate a smoke-filled room to reach an emergency exit

But how do you read your digital watch under such circumstances if you can't see anything?

[Bebu sa Ware]

From my experience most bus services everywhere…

could run on sundials for their scheduling.

The bus on a local service has a display screen for the route and upcoming stops which displays UK civil time and a route somewhere near London which is dandy but for the fact the bus is on the other side of the planet.

Unlike most of the local services it is runs mostly on time and the time on the screen is correct within a second once the timezone and UK summertime offset are taken into account — I suppose it is the stopped clock principle at work (when all the forces of fuckedness converge on a point even the totally broken works.)

Murcan Anguish: Hale Cesium ? or Heil Kaiserium ? Stopped clocks ?

[David Hicklin]

Re: From my experience most bus services everywhere…

Try changing the settings from 24Hr to 12Hr .....

[mikecoppicegreen]

Obligatory Goon Show....

what time is it, Eccles?

https://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/what_time_is_it.html

[rg287]

Good.

Now drop some cash with Trinity House to pick up their eLORAN trials. Trinity House discontinued their Initial Operating Capability in 2015, alongside partners in France and Norway. They knocked off their DGPS network in 2022 on the basis multi-constellation GNSS and RAIM (Receiver autonomous integrity monitoring) were adequate.

DGPS probably isn't actually needed - either you have GNSS (multi-constellation, RAIM) or you don't, and if you do, then it's highly precise these days. For maritime, the integrity/anti-spoof provision within DGPS was as important as the improvements to positioning. If you don't, eLORAN would be handy.

In the scheme of things, the cost of a dozen eLORAN base stations as a backup to satellite systems is trivial.

[Michael Strorm]

Say kids, what time is it?

It's time for... The Mary Whitehouse Experience.

Or house, or whatever...

[breakfast]

What's the time?

It's defcon one!

[rockpile99]

Wasn't "fiber" one of the rabbits in Watership down?

[BartyFartsLast]

Seems wise

Removing reliance on the US GPS system I wonder...

[Mrs Spartacus]

Buses

Wonderful. Presumably this means that South West Trains' replacement bus services will be on time, sometimes.

[John Sager]

A bit light on tech

For a tech news site I would have expected a bit more tech than just "180 million quid on new time stuff". A link to the actual nuts & bolts of the proposal would have been good. Perhaps there isn't one and this is all government vapourware so far?

This NPL press release is the only thing I could find with a quick look, and that is as vapid as the article.

[Simon Rockman]

Don't mention Brexit

One of the reasons this is necessary is Brexit. A lot of networks, crucially mobile phone networks use GPS for sync. A mobile phone cell doesn't need GPS to know where it is, it needs it to know when it is. This allows cells to cope with sharing users who do move, and managing handoff. It doesn't even need the time, it just needs a heartbeat in sync with nearby cells.

Having sovereign ownership of a GNSS system is an important part of Critical National Infrastructure. Since we left Europe we were no longer linked to Galileo so no longer have that sovereign ownership. The first thing the government did was piss half a billion up the wall on One Web (https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/uk_buys_oneweb/) but that doesn't give the sync we need. It's even more crucial because thanks also to Brexit we are not part of IRIS² (https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/16/europe_iris2_broadband_deal) so have no Plan B. IRIS² exists to be a completely independent communications network in time of war to provide an alternative to terrestrial networks.

It's because of these two Brexit-dictated weaknesses in our communications networks that we need a terrestrial way of providing sync. Hence, the spending with NPL.

Brexit Bonus? Nope.

[Grendel]

Why only two sites?

Surely our new national timing service should be built on a minimum of three sites so that if one site were to go down then we would still have a resillient service?

[collinsl]

Re: Why only two sites?

In theory they need a minimum of three sites - with NTP at least you need an odd number of sources so that if they disagree you can tell which one is out (with two which one do you pick as "right"?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope they use a decent server and internet connection!

I hope NPL use servers and internet connectiions with better jitter than their current system:

remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter

=======================================================================================================

xSHM(0) .GPS. 0 l 1 16 377 0.0000 -568.364 8.6148

*SHM(1) .PPS. 0 l 8 16 377 0.0000 0.0045 0.0155

-ns0.thorcom.net .PPS. 1 u 4 64 273 12.7072 0.9278 0.0505

-ns1.thorcom.net .PPS. 1 u 23 64 377 12.7883 0.9570 0.0289

#ntpsvr1.npl.co.uk .MBGh. 1 u 32 64 377 7.1318 0.1494 118.2485

+ntpsvr2.npl.co.uk .MBGh. 1 u 42 64 377 6.9659 0.0953 0.0416

-ntp1.ja.net .MRS. 1 u 58 64 377 13.6484 1.1012 0.1401

-ntp2.ja.net 194.210.37.76 2 u 37 64 377 12.7824 0.8646 0.0297

-swale.mc.man.ac.uk 193.62.22.66 2 u 66 64 377 13.5371 0.2244 0.1891

-ntp0.cam.ac.uk 197.205.52.7 2 u 39 64 367 8.2084 -0.0374 0.0431

+ntp1.cam.ac.uk 128.232.103.138 2 u 51 64 377 8.1991 0.0046 0.0209

-dns1.eng.cam.ac.uk 128.232.103.138 2 u 60 64 377 7.7601 0.1284 0.1273

#ntp0.cis.strath.ac.uk 193.62.22.90 2 u 27 64 377 16.6419 -1.0449 0.0308

#time-d-g.nist.gov .NIST. 1 u 50 64 377 84.0142 -0.1160 1.6425

#time-d-b.nist.gov .NIST. 1 u 14 64 277 119.5323 -1.0417 0.0365

ntpq>