I 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

I 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.