Time for CUCM installed on a ship

James Hawkins · ‎04-14-2009

Hi,

I have a potential customer who requires a phone system for a ship. It is likely to be CUCM 6.1 with aproximately 90 phones using SCCP.

I would like to know if there is any way of automatically synchronising the time displayed by the IP phones to "ship time" which is explained below.

"A ship within the territorial waters of any nation uses that nation's time. In international waters, time zone boundaries are meridians 15Â° apart, except that UTC-12 and UTC+12 are each 7.5Â° wide and are separated by the 180Â° meridian (not by the International Date Line, which is for land and territorial waters only). A captain can change ship's clocks any time after entering a new time zone; midnight changes are common."

As the phones derive their time from the CUCM servers which in turn can be synced to an NTP server I am wondering whether anyone can supply a device that checks the vessels location by satellite and then changes the advertised time to reflect the local time.

I am not hopeful that this can be done as NTP is not really designed to do this but if anyone knows differently please let me know.

jeff.garvas · ‎04-14-2009

Can't you setup an NTP server that sources itself from GPS? Wouldn't GPS time be accurate regardless of where you are?

Granted it might change before midnight, unless you only had the NTP server query the GPS at midnight each night.

Try googling for GPS and NTP. Here was the first thing I found:

http://time.qnan.org/