China Completes Construction of Its 10,000-Kilometer High-Precision Optical Fiber Time Service System

China's National Time Service Center (NTSC) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences officially announced today a major breakthrough in the national key science and technology infrastructure project — the "High-Precision Ground-Based Time Service System". The announcement confirms the successful completion of a high-precision optical fiber time service system. This system spans over six major trunk links across the country, with a total length exceeding 10,000 kilometers. It is set to be widely applied in fields with demanding requirements for time-frequency precision and reliability, including Beidou satellite navigation augmentation, 5G/6G communication synchronization, deep space exploration, financial transactions, smart grids, artificial intelligence, the digital economy, national defense security, and scientific research.

It is reported that this time service system marks the world's first achievement in breaking through the technology for high-precision optical fiber time transfer over a 10,000-kilometer scale.