Lack of effective time signals could hamper IoT development
nist.gov
nist.gov
One of the strengths of the Internet is that it doesn't need tight time synchronization to work. Analog TV did; all the network cameras and videotape machines were synched to a time source in New York. Early digital telephony did; all the time-division multiplexed lines were synched to a time source in New Jersey.
As for real time, getting a response consistently within N milliseconds doesn't require global time synchronization. A local clock is fine. Real time operating systems such as QNX and VxWorks routinely do that. (The usual test: hook up a square wave generator to a digital input. Have it trigger an interrupt which activates a process. Have the process turn on a digital output. Connect the digital input and output to a scope. Are there any outliers, output signals that are delayed from the expected response time? There shouldn't be, even if there are low-priority background jobs running. Linux can't do that, but a true real time OS can.)
There's a demand for microsecond level clock synchronization in the financial community, to measure the delays and record the order in high-frequency trading transactions. And Google apparently uses tight time synchronization for distributed database commit synchronization. But there's no reason to require that outside single industry boundaries.
[1] http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/TechnicalNotes/NIST.TN.1867...