> Unless the asymmetric delay is on the path which both the ping and the NTP synchronization take
Assuming the NTP server is not on the LAN using a GPS (or other radio) reference, a large part of the asymmetry is on the poster's VDSL last mile hop. At least on my bonded VDSL2 line, it seems there's significant asymmetry; I found with regular ntpd I needed to delay incoming packets by around 18 ms to get a good match between a GPS receiver and network servers; my round trip time to the PPPoE concentrator is about 21 ms, and I was able to find a few NTP servers close enough that round trip to them was about 22 ms; not much room for additional asymmetry there.
Assuming the NTP server is not on the LAN using a GPS (or other radio) reference, a large part of the asymmetry is on the poster's VDSL last mile hop. At least on my bonded VDSL2 line, it seems there's significant asymmetry; I found with regular ntpd I needed to delay incoming packets by around 18 ms to get a good match between a GPS receiver and network servers; my round trip time to the PPPoE concentrator is about 21 ms, and I was able to find a few NTP servers close enough that round trip to them was about 22 ms; not much room for additional asymmetry there.