Activities at the Bureau of Standards Jamaica: Developing a Time Monitoring and Synchronization Service

The Bureau of Standards Jamaica (BSJ) has recently achieved direct traceability to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) with the publication of its official time scale, UTC(BSJ), in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) Circular T. This realization, based on two cesium frequency standards, will be analysed in terms of its performance. The government of Jamaica intends to introduce regulations requiring the financial industry to adhere to standardized traceability to UTC, ensuring that the time offset does not exceed 50 milliseconds (ms). This paper presents our implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) method to disseminate UTC(BSJ) over the public internet and to monitor each customer’s offset in a traceable manner.