[6] Endace was the first New Zealand company to list on London's Alternative Investment Market when it floated in mid-June 2005[7] a move which was not without controversy.

[8] Poor share price performance in the early years and a seeming failure to attract a broad enough shareholder base lent weight to the criticism that Endace should have focused initially on developing its local profile (via NZX) rather than pushing for overseas investment (via London AIM).

Not only does this obviate latency, jitter and problems caused by interrupt coalescing, the hardware is capable of much greater accuracy and precision than software-generated timestamps.

Precision comes from the freedom of custom hardware to assign as many bits to the timestamp as required and accuracy is assured by reference to an external time source such as GPS which is accurate to ± 40 nanoseconds.

[9] In contrast, the accuracy of NTP (by which kernel clocks can be corrected over the Internet) is in the order of milliseconds (about 100,000 times less accurate), depending on the conditions involved.

Crucially, and an academically significant contribution of the DAG, the ability to use an external reference such as globally synchronised GPS makes it possible to do one-way time-of-flight measurements.

Outside of the academic world, timestamp accuracy has commercial applications in the enforcement and compliance with law such as the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive 2004.

[13] Edward Snowden documents have shown that the GCHQ has installed massive surveillance of network communications in UK, using the over-sea cable between Europe and North America.