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NTP Pool Reaches 1000 Servers, Needs More
hgerstung writes "This weekend the NTP Pool Project reached the milestone of 1000 servers in the pool. That means that in less than two years the number of servers has doubled. This is happy news, but the 'time backbone' of the Internet, provided for free by volunteers operating NTP servers, requires still more servers in order to cope with the demand. Millions of users are synchronizing their PC's system clock from the pool and a number of popular Linux distributions are using the NTP pool servers as a time source in their default ntp configuration. If you have a static IP address and your PC is always connected to the Internet, please consider joining the pool. Bandwidth is not an issue and you will barely notice the extra load on your machine."
Why not design a time protocol that's peer-to-peer? Most people, like me and probably 99% of the people on the internet, can make due with time being within a few seconds (or frankly, within a couple of minutes) of accuracy, so if you only have a few nodes at the top that actually get the time from NTP and anyone who actually needs really accurate time using NTP, everyone else can share the time.
Seems to me that would get rid of the need for thousands of servers and would suit the needs of most users.