What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.
Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.
It's not super important when compared to basic needs like plumbing, food, electricity, medical assistance and other silly things we take for granted but are heavily dependent on. We all saw what happened to hospitals during the early stages of the COVID pandemic; we had plenty of internet and electricity but were struggling on the medical part. That was quite bad... I'm not sure if it's any worse if an entire country/continent lost access to the Internet. Quite a lot of our core infrastructure components in society rely on this. And a fair bit of it relies on a common understanding of what time "now" is.
- GPS
- industrial complex that synchronize operations (we could include trains)
- telecoms in general (so a level higher than the internet)
(Random search result from space force https://www.ssc.spaceforce.mil/Newsroom/Article/4039094/50-y... claims that cell phone tower-to-tower handoff uses GPS-mediated timing (only microsecond level though.)
