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The trouble is that it has always been a case of "Backdoors for me but not for thee" rather than backdoor free.

And as for the price - I was surprised at the cost stated when even a quick search turned up various RTC modules for as low as 0.50p/$0.50 per module which I'm sure could be obtained (in bulk) for a lot less.

Ah well, I guess I just don't understand big business and geo-politics.

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RTCs are only in the tens to hundreds of millions of parts per million accuracy per day, they’re talking crystals so we’re probably talking parts like OCXOs with three or four or more orders of magnitude better accuracy/stability (even down to less than 1ppb per day).

Still these parts are only around one hundred to a couple of hundred dollars per unit, depending on specs, but the bulk of the cost was likely the NRE of hardware design (you actually need to interface these things in, which means board design etc.) and all the software development.

In relatively small quantity electronics, BOM cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of anything.

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