Re: Wrong time zone sent by tower

At 19 Jun 2007 14:29:30 -0400 Harlan Messinger wrote:
I just checked something that was causing a problem a couple of months
ago and it's still there. I'm in Northern Virginia, in the Eastern US
time zone (GMT-5) and we're currently on daylight savings time, so
we're four hours behind GMT. Originally I had my Treo 700W set to use
the network's time zone--and found consistently that my phone thought
it was in the Caracas (GMT-4) time zone, which produced the correct
time but which was still wrong.

Why does it matter? Caracas doesn't observe DST, so the phone is GMT-4
either way. I just teste
on my PPC phone, and it didn't cause an appointment shift Because there
is no absolute time difference between DC and Caracas right now.

I finally figured out that I had the option to have just the time and
not the time zone set from the network, so I switched to that option,
and manually set my time zone to Eastern Time.

Nice. My phone doesn't have that option- it's time and zone or nothing.

Today I momentarily turned back on the option to have the network set
the time zone, and it immediately switched back to Caracas. End of
experiment.


And again, what's the problem? Essentially it's the difference between
Eastern Time being called "New York" or "Orlando" time- it'sthe same time
either way (at least until DST ends.)

When I'm in Denver, my T-Mobile MDA switched to "Saskatchewan." Both are
the same time, and don't mess up my appointments, so why would I care?

Are other people in my area getting the same signal? Is it possible
that Verizon's towers would be announcing the time zone as Caracas Time
for months without anyone fixing it?

Why not- since it's not a problem for anyone!

I even have a theory why it might be intentional: since so many
smartphones probably weren't properly patched for the DST changes this
year, Verizon probably thought it'd be simpler to switch to a true GMT-4
zone for the east coast when DST kicked in than stay on GMT-5 and hope
every Treo, Blackberry and VX-6700 owner properly applied their
respective patches. That way, even unpatched phones would display the
correct time. I suspect that's why T-Mo chose Saskatchewan for Mountain
time as well- it's a non-DST area that happens to match US MDT.

Just a theory anyway. If they are also using Indiana for Central,
Saskatchewan for Mountain, and Arizona for Pacific Time, I'll wager my
theory is spot-on.



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