Dear all, Thank you for highlighting the issue with NTP offset calculation.
We have identified it and are working on a fix, which we expect to issue in
an upcoming release. In the meantime, our suggestion towards users is to
use the reported timestamps in the measurement results to perform the
RFC-compliant offset calculation. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Best regards,

--
Marios Mavropoulos Papoudas
Software Engineer - RIPE Atlas
RIPE NCC

On Wed, 9 Jul 2025 at 11:22, via ripe-atlas <[email protected]> wrote:

>  > how does Atlas computes the `precision` field?
>
> I believe the format_8bit() function in the probe's ntp.c is responsible
> for the conversion [1].
>
> 4x10E-6 would be an NTP precision value of -18 (3.815 us), which isn't
> great nowadays, but I think not completely out off whack.
>
> [1]
>
> https://github.com/RIPE-NCC/ripe-atlas-software-probe/blob/57515ad8a4a84f19af0d05c9696fd8d3304408eb/probe-busybox/eperd/ntp.c#L302
>
>
> On 09.07.25 09:47, Giovane C. M. Moura via ripe-atlas wrote:
> > Hi Philip,
> >
> >
> >> Looking at the code, it seems that the Atlas NTP measurement
> >> computes the offset with exactly the opposite sign compared to the
> >> NTP RFCs.
> >>
> >> I never noticed before.
> >
> > Thanks. Since we are on it, the timestamps are _correct_ , so any user
> > can still compute the offset based on the data
> >
> > Question: how does Atlas computes the `precision` field?
> >
> > I had someone telling on the NTP pool that `Precision from RIPE Atlas
> > probes looks rather low to me (4x10E-6).`
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > /giovane
> >
> > [0] https://community.ntppool.org/t/site-to-evaluate-ntp-servers/3931/2
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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