A recent post proposed enabling Orbi routers as Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. (The post has since disappeared... "This happens" from time to time.)
There are two reasons why this is not likely to happen:
Although essential, NTP does not represent a significant percentage of network usage. Orbi logs show that the router itself updates network time only once per day. If other devices have similar behavior, a network with 100 devices would make about 100 UDP transactions per day. Contrast that with DNS, where a single web connection could result in several hundred DNS lookups in a few seconds! Residential WiFi routers almost always act as DNS relays because they reduce the network load from (thousands? 10's of thousands?) of connections per day to only hundreds. A huge reduction in network load.
There is no practical way to communicate to user devices that the router is acting as an NTP server. When devices request network information using DHCP, the items they receive include (1) IP address, (2) subnet mask, (3) Internet Gateway, and (4) DNS servers (almost always the router itself). One item not communicated using DHCP is where to find an NTP server. Even if the Orbi router were to respond to NTP requests, not a single device on the network would every ask!
Just as the Orbi DNS intercepts DNS requests to http://orbilogin.net and several other URLs and responds with "That IP is ME"**, the Orbi could in theory intercept connections to NTP (UDP port 123) and respond (rather than forward the packet to the intended host. But why? What happens if a program wants to compare the time from various NTP servers?
