Interactive tool

What does a clock excursion actually cost?

Model the regulatory, operational and financial cost of a GNSS disruption on your timing fabric. Pick your industry, your oscillator class, the outage duration and your business scale — the calculator does the rest.

Published drift ratesITIC 2022 downtime dataMiFID II / FINRA enforcementNo fabricated numbers

Configure the scenario

Your timing fabric, your failure mode

No breach — fabric stays in budget

In budget

PTP — OCXO holdover holds worst-case drift at 1.68 µs across 4 hr — inside the 100.0 µs budget for Finance — High-Frequency Trading. No estimated regulatory or operational exposure from clock drift in this scenario.

Drift over time

Y-axis: time error vs UTC · X-axis: GNSS outage duration

100.0 µs budget01 hr2 hr3 hr4 hr0 ns65.0 µs130.0 µs

Worst-case drift

1.68 µs

After 4 hr of free-run on Oven-controlled crystal oscillator

Time to breach

Beyond window

Against 100.0 µs Finance — High-Frequency Trading budget

Operational exposure

$0

Fabric never drifted outside the budget

Regulatory exposure

$0 – $0

Published MiFID II and FINRA enforcement actions for clock-sync failures range from small administrative fines to multi-hundred-thousand penalties for systematic breaches. Systematic or repeated failures can trigger further action under the 10% of annual turnover ceiling.

Recommendation

Your current oscillator class fits the budget

OCXO holdover keeps worst-case drift at approximately 1.68 µs over 4 hr — comfortably inside the 100.0 µs budget.

Standard OCXO-based PTP grandmaster. Drifts roughly 1–10 µs over 24 hours of free-run. Sufficient for most enterprise deployments with rare, short GNSS outages. Common OCP TAP reference design.

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Methodology

Drift rates are conservative linear approximations of published typical values from vendor datasheets and ITU-T G.8273.2 class specifications. Real oscillator drift has stochastic and temperature-dependent components — this calculator uses worst-case of the published typical range so the estimates land on the cautious side.

Operational cost ranges are drawn from the ITIC 2022 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report. Regulatory ranges use published enforcement actions under MiFID II RTS 25 and FINRA Rule 613 / SEC Rule 613 where applicable. No fabricated numbers.

This is a model, not financial or legal advice. For regulated activities, the calculator output should be reviewed with your compliance and legal teams against your specific activity profile, jurisdiction and supervisory arrangements.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How does the cost-of-drift calculator work?+
The calculator takes four inputs: your industry (which sets the regulatory or operational time-error budget), your current oscillator class (which determines the drift rate during a GNSS outage), the duration of the disruption, and your business scale. It then computes the worst-case drift at the end of the disruption, whether that drift exceeds the compliance budget, how long the fabric spends out of compliance, and the estimated cost range based on ITIC industry downtime figures and published regulatory enforcement data.
Where do the drift rate figures come from?+
Drift rates are conservative linear approximations of published typical values from vendor datasheets and the ITU-T G.8273.2 class specifications. Real oscillator drift has stochastic and temperature-dependent components; the calculator uses the worst-case end of the published typical range so the estimates land on the cautious side.
Where do the cost figures come from?+
Operational downtime cost ranges are drawn from the ITIC 2022 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report — a widely cited annual study of enterprise IT downtime costs across industries. Regulatory exposure ranges use published enforcement actions under MiFID II RTS 25 and FINRA Rule 613 / SEC Rule 613 where applicable. No fabricated numbers.
Is this financial or legal advice?+
No. The calculator provides modelled estimates based on published industry data. For regulated activities, the output should be reviewed with your compliance and legal teams against your specific activity profile, jurisdiction and supervisory arrangements. The calculator helps frame the conversation; it doesn't replace professional advice.
Can I share my results?+
Yes. The calculator encodes your inputs in the URL query string. Click the 'Share this scenario' button to copy the URL, and anyone who opens it will see the calculator pre-loaded with your inputs.
What oscillator class does the calculator recommend?+
The cheapest oscillator class that would have kept the timing fabric within the compliance budget for the full duration of the disruption. The recommendation changes as you adjust the inputs — longer disruptions and tighter budgets push toward higher oscillator classes.

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