In message <003501c38940$34098fe0$eea28c45@wifey>, "Robert M. Enger" <enger@seka.erols.net> wrote:
An alternate time source could be the GLONASS system. Receivers do exist, but I have never used one.
Note that GLONASS satellites are failing frequently, and unlike GPS satellites, are not always being replaced. Currently only eight are operational out of a desired constellation of 24. http://www.glonass-center.ru/nagu.txt GLONASS is also subject to many of the same failure modes as GPS -- antenna failure, jamming, &c. A very robust design would fall back to a local frequency standard rather than to another transmitted one. You need to decide how good that standard needs to be based on your requirements (or maybe you just want to install cesium or rubidium so your marketing department can say you have atomic clocks).
The US FAA is transmitting WAAS correction signals. Depending on the algorithms in the GPS receiver, this may result a reduction in PPS jitter. (although any such jitter is probably swamped by the jitter at the IP layer)
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:AZ97VsY3w10J:www.cmcelectronics.ca/products-services/custom-elect/Enhancing_GPS_Timing_Engines_using_WAAS_signals.pdf+waas+timing&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 suggests that WAAS can reduce your PPS jitter from about 50 ns to about 20 ns, which sounds plausible to me. This is beyond the level of accuracy that is needed or useful for NTP. Might I suggest that comp.protocols.time.ntp would have better advice on this than NANOG. Even 10 ms accuracy is usually enough for network operations. Beyond that we're talking about operating a service, not a network. -- Shields.