This reminded me of the buffer bloat[0] problem esr was talking about a few years ago.
I thought I read a paper where he was getting hardware made for the purpose of using gps for time so it could be accurate enough to measure latency. I just googled and I realized it wasn't a paper, it was a talk I went to in 2012 that I forgot about[1]
I wonder if anything came of it, does anyone know?
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bufferbloat (it made the front page more than once)