The Time as a Service from theory to practice

“Time is money”, especially in automated financial transactions, where a millisecond can mean millions of euros. Therefore an accurate and certified timestamp system is mandatory. But this is not only a matter of business and financial turnover, the European Securities and Markets Authority’s MiFID-II RTS 25 Markets Directive, in fact, requires now the traceability according the UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) for stock markets.
The TOP-IX member INRIM addressed this challenge by delivering the UTC international time scale via optical fiber. Particularly, the first step in this field has been the creation of a working link between Turin and the financial district of Milan, thanks to the TOP-IX Consortium backbone.
After the experimentation phase, the Time as a Service (TaaS) service is now fully operational and it provides for the dissemination of the time sample certified by INRIM through the fiber-optic infrastructure managed by TOP-IX on dedicated channels, separated from those used for other network activities. Service is performed with a protocol which is an evolution of Precise Time Protocol (PTP) IEEE 1588v2.
“Compared to other solutions, the time over fiber offers high accuracy and preserves the integrity of time” as explained by Andrea Casalegno, Technical Director of TOP-IX. In the specific case of the transactions, the fiber ensures a certain dating, referable to UTC time, with a level of accuracy of a few nanoseconds.
In addition to the financial sector, the service can be applied in the aerospace, telecommunications (5G) and smart grid fields, which require high precision time and frequency references.