4 ms·

I think a lot of cellular technologies rely on GPS on their base stations as a timing reference. Most cellular capabilities might fall off a cliff if GPS isn’t

I think a lot of cellular technologies rely on GPS on their base stations as a timing reference. Most cellular capabilities might fall off a cliff if GPS isn’t available.

myself248 7y ago
Right. They have a few hours of holdover before things start to lose sync, and when sync degrades, the towers may stay on the air but handoffs get real rough. They may also take themselves off the air after too long in holdover, but that's a software setting. Conceivably this could be overridden by network operators (in close cooperation with their equipment vendor) in a prolonged GPS outage where it was determined that having the towers on-air as islands without handoff would be better than nothing.
Fnoord 7y ago
Why though? If the celltower has networking (e.g. 4G), it could use NTP. The databases with GSM just use triangulation. As long as they broadcast, the triangulation should work.
- brohee 7y ago
  Best case NTP is in the order of millisecond precision. Completely inadequate for this case.