4 ms·
It used to irritate me that my old dumb mobile must have known exactly the correct time in order to operate on the cell phone network. Yet it kept it secret fro
by gandalfian 3y ago
It used to irritate me that my old dumb mobile must have known exactly the correct time in order to operate on the cell phone network. Yet it kept it secret from me. I had to manually set the clock by guesstimate
- callalex 3y agoIn the early days of mobile networks, it was my experience that the network time was not very good. Sometimes off by a minute or two, but most often filled with DST bugs.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoI think the poster is getting at the fact they had a CDMA phone - those require extremely tight clock synchronization in order to work. Like a phone needs a sub-chip level of synchronization to a base station (order of a few hundred ns) otherwise it won't be locked to the relevant codes. All this is down at the modem layer and was probably not externalized to the crappy CPU that ran the OS for the phone though. You can still use the CDMA networks to get a very precise time reference, suitable for a stratum-1 timeserver, but I think not for very much longer.