The British government has committed £180 million to build an alternative to satellite-based timing infrastructure, betting that atomic clocks are worth the cost when the alternative is economic catastrophe.
The National Timing Centre, led by the National Physical Laboratory, will create an alternative to satellite timing technology to help keep the UK's economy, public services and transport networks moving even in the face of severe disruption. The project sits at the intersection of two concerns: genuine vulnerability in critical infrastructure, and the kind of long-term planning that governments often find politically difficult.
The financial case is stark.A 24-hour outage of satellite-based timing services could result in a £1.4 billion loss to the UK economy, with a 7-day outage costing £7.6 billion. These are not hypothetical figures.Recent incidents in Ukraine have shown how satellite signals can be deliberately disrupted, with jamming attacks repeatedly interfering with civilian aircraft and other critical services.
This is where the fiscal argument gains traction. The investment looks small against potential losses. Yet it also exemplifies a governance problem worth examining: the UK is spending serious money to fix a problem that exists partly because it relied on American infrastructure without building resilience into that dependence.
How it works
The National Timing Centre is a major research and development programme responsible for developing the UK's first nationally distributed timing infrastructure, aiming to create sovereign, terrestrial and high-quality timing that will improve the resilience and implementation of new technologies.
Two dedicated sites will now harness atomic clocks to share signals via fibre, satellites and radio waves, meaning systems no longer have to depend on any single location or on transmissions that are easier to disrupt.The National Physical Laboratory is the home of UK time and provides accurate, resilient and secure timing, traceable to the global time scale, Coordinated Universal Time.
MIT boffins have recently developed a technique to tune out quantum noise, making atomic clocks, typically based on the vibrations of cesium atoms, even more accurate. The caesium clocks powering this network will be accurate enough that it would take 160 million years for them to drift by just one second.
What it's for
The investment will support the rollout of new technologies requiring precise and synchronised time, including 5G/6G applications, smart cities and connected autonomous vehicles.The programme aims to ease the UK's reliance on satellite services, which can often be targeted and disrupted.
Beyond the immediate defence case,the funding will help build British expertise in precision timing training, creating opportunities for graduates, apprentices and PhD-level training to ensure the UK has the skills needed to maintain secure, reliable timekeeping while backing innovative British firms to scale up and drive national renewal.
The counterargument is familiar: this is expensive infrastructure built against a catastrophe that may never occur. Governments routinely underinvest in resilience because the payoff is invisible. The case for £180 million rests on the assumption that a few hours of network failure would cause cascading damage across finance, emergency services, transport and utilities. That is probably true, but untested.
For now, the UK is attempting what Australia, the EU, and other strategic actors are doing: building sovereign capacity in systems they cannot afford to lose. Whether the investment pays dividends or sits idle as expensive insurance will only become clear if the unthinkable happens.