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Prior to 1883, the North American railroads had a logistical problem. Most towns kept time by the movement of the sun. It was highly localized, and therefore for a passenger to properly catch a train they show up quite early and wait sometimes for hours.

You could imagine commercial freight issues.

November 18th, 1883, the railroad companies used their immense political power to re-write the continent’s timekeeping policy. With the introduction of four time zones across the nation, railroad and logistics platforms adopted a more efficient means of keeping things in sync, and the modern commercial railroad was born.

Networks are no different. Tracing a packet through a network requires every device to be highly accurate in terms of time. In the micro-second world of today’s high-capacity networks, we need to correlate events across the network in sequence. Solving problems shouldn’t include the logistical nightmare of having to adjust for time differences at every device.

It is IBC standard practice to always ensure that every single device on the network gets its time from a trusted and central source. An efficient troubleshooting process leads to less downtime and a more agile business in general.