In 2002 the IEEE completed and approved the 1588 Standard Document for the Grand Master Clock. In 2005 the first Grand Master Clock was brought into a lab for configuration and to make available for Symmetricom to develop a Client devices for operation. From this point the precise time in increments supporting very granular packet transport such as Ethernet could be supported.
By 2006 we were proposing the incorporation of the Grand Master Clock Master and Slave configuration into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) work efforts when adopting the first improvements to NTPv3 for a new NTPv4. An individual work effort, the TIC TOC committee in IETF was launched to prove out the theories and applications for a using NTP and SNTP during packet processing. To date, NTP was used for Time of Day Server and performance report generation information. SNTP was being used for Jitter Analysis when the ethernet network was configured to use time-stamp query from a reference clock. The reference clock supporting the server and it's clients might be of any known stratum reference or a free-run state.
The TIC TOC committee has come to a conclusion to incorporate not only a specification for the use of the IEEE 1588 Grand Master Clock but also the use and specification for the Slave Client operation which can be implemented in routers, IP set-top-boxes, even Streaming Media Web Servers and their media-players.
Microsoft was an early adopter for it's Windows Media Center products, while Alcatel, Tellabs, Riverbed and now Cisco are utilizing in their routers (the client function). Carriers are deploying in Cellular and Video networks since 2006, awaiting refinement in the more applications oriented standards bodies (MEF, ATIS, Open Cable Labs).
The value of the IEEE 1588 is two-fold 1) allow inter-packet jitter analysis to granularity of 12 places to the right of the decimal point, far better than nano-second analysis achieved in stratum. The 2nd application is to order packets in fifo or leaky bucket buffers using timestamps in addition to sequence number for decoding assembly or transit traffic management.g adoptance nor billing record settlements but was able to go on to processing more than 80% of all Cellular DA calls for nearly a 10 year period. The Cellular Companies realized their goals as PSC merged partners by 1998.