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qb2021

At this one industrial customer I visit every week for a full day, my Verizon cell phone date/time time will suddenly change back by 19 years, six months, and some days (I don't have the exact value). This has been going on for almost a year. My pet theory was that law enforcement turned on a stingray nearby back in 2020, it came up with a default date of 1/1/2001, and has been running ever since. Steel building with warehouse plus office space. No one in the building is running one of those cell phone boosters that plug into customer internet and act as a mini tower. My newish pixel 4 and my previous Moto phone both demonstrate the problem. I don't have the fortitude to call Verizon and work through support to get to someone who would understand the problem. Has this happened to anyone else? Any other theories on what it is? (My workaround is to turn off updating date and time from the network)

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It is not uncommon that entire towers or basebands have invalid time. Some of the reason that i encountered personally:

- Badly configured basebands (for example lack of summer/winter time change flag!)

- Broken PTP

- Stations that take time from NTP which does not exist or does not have route to.

- I don't know the name for it, but getting time from local Nodeb is an feature - and sometimes features are not active or licensed[1].

- Station setup with GPS instead PTP/NTP (let's say for 2G or some slower HDSPA modes) with broken GPS module itself

- Software error [basebands have multiple versions of software, same goes for APG's, SCU'S, RRU's and dozen other black boxes. Even cabinet itself have some software. This is big pain in the ass to keep them all updated in large network - as upgrade process can be disruptive and sometimes it is better to not upgrade [cases of some really wacky stations]...

- Problem with software in terms of PTP implemetation. For example there are some discrepancies between Huawei and Ericsson software when it comes to PTP.

[1]. This is big shocker for Open Source Software community:

- EVERY SINGLE FEATURE in base station is not only NOT free, but Telecoms needs to pay them every single month[all manufactures: Nokia, Ericsson, HUA do that]. We are talking here in about 100-200 licenses for various features per site alone. If you don't buy new license every 28 days - your base station will turn off and it's nothing you can do.

- Hardware provider can also refuse to give you new licenses in theory...

- This is real hell of SaS world that NO ONE is talking about.

Yep, i complained and they fixed it (mobile operator or the stingray.. don't know who caused the issue or if there even was a stingray (or just a misconfigured basestation)).

The problem i had is, that the time in my case was in the future, so when i called someone (personA) from within that cell, the call was made sometime in 2025... this wouldn't bother me in general, but when you use the redial function in your headset (double tap on the button), the phone would call the last dialed number (which means max(timestamp), not the actual last call), and instead of ringing the last person dialed (eg. personB), it would redial the personA I called from the affected cell, and after misdialing them by accident, a couple of times, I had to manual remove that call from the calllog, to get the redial to work again... until I entered that cell again and called someone from there again.

A guy on a team that I worked on detected one of those devices and called the university police (we were a tenant in a university building), who laughed, and then proceeded to methodically and politely walk the hierarchy of agencies with jurisdiction (sheriff, city police, state police, FBI field office, FCC, etc). I believe he called a member of Congress as well.

Eventually somebody figured out that he wasn’t going away, and a couple of very pleasant guys popped in and dropped off their business cards. They told him it wouldn’t be a problem anymore and to give them a call if it became a problem again.

End of the day, if someone is creating interference, they need to stop. If you have the time and inclination, complain and they will.

> A guy on a team that I worked on detected one of those devices and called the university police (we were a tenant in a university building), who laughed, and then proceeded to methodically and politely walk the hierarchy of agencies with jurisdiction (sheriff, city police, state police, FBI field office, FCC, etc).

Since it took me a minute to parse: the guy on the team, not the university police, was the one who walked the hierarchy?

> ... a couple of very pleasant guys popped in and dropped off their business cards. They told him it wouldn’t be a problem anymore ...

> End of the day, if someone is creating interference, they need to stop.

I'm not sure which way to interpret this, your username might check out after all.

Could it possibly be because the time is being set from GPS, somewhere in the stack? The 19-and-a-half year offset is spot on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover

If so according to the link the phone needs to be from 2013 or older, or an iPhone from 2012 or before. That would give gp an award in no unnecessary upgrades :-)

I think they mean at the cellular network level (or stingray,) not the phone itself.

It could be a cell tower that gets its time from GPS (incorrectly)

Yes, a similar thing used to happen to me just at this one particular bar in Chelsea. But it wasn't off by 19 years, it was off by just an hour, which is worse in a way. That made for some confusing drunken time warps until I figured out the pattern...

I was in a rental vacation house at the southeastern end of Lake Michigan three years ago. It was a pretty big house, and as you walked from one end to the other, the time zone would change. Really messed with me until I figured that out.

Antelope Canyon is a popular tourist attraction in Arizona.

During the summer Utah is on daylight savings time, Arizona does NOT observe daylight savings time but the Navajo Nation within Arizona DOES observe daylight savings time.

Antelope Canyon is on Navajo Nation land and requires a tour guide from a licensed tour guide company. The canyon and tour guides DO observe daylight savings time.

The canyon is only about 5 miles from the Utah border and many people are traveling from Utah. Because of all the competing cell phone towers you end up with people that show up at the wrong time.

I purposely brought an old school watch for my trip.

I recall in Nevada (Pacific time), there's one city right near the utah border that observes mountain time. I don't think my electronics figured it out.

edit: it is West Wendover NV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Wendover,_Nevada

I've been there. It's a bunch of casinos literally a foot over the state border. It's less than 2 hours west of Salt Lake City. Wendover is a tiny town in Utah but West Wendover in Nevada is completely different just a foot over the border.

They probably want to stay on Mountain time because 99% of their visitors/customers are from Salt Lake City on mountain time and their TV stations are also probably from Salt Lake City

I once ran an A/B time-of-send test for our readers where I analyzed the results by local time. Timezones and DST made it a painful experience.

Something similar has also happened to me. In my case, the symptom was that the TOTP 2FA to systems at work started to fail. It took me some time to find that the cause was an around 1 minute offset between my phone and the correct (NTP-synchronized) time as shown by my desktop. Setting the phone to not synchronize its date/time to the network (and correcting its time) fixed it, but it's annoying since without the network synchronization, the time slowly drifts. My theory is that there's one single tower that does not have its time correctly synchronized, and that annoyingly it's the "best" tower when I'm sitting at my desk.

Since then, I've not trusted that automatic network time adjustment, and I leave it disabled. Periodically, I check if it's drifted too much, and if it has, I quickly enable and then disable the network time adjustment (in a place far from the misconfigured tower).

You can disable automatic synchronization from BTS, and install some Android application for NTP time synchronization (for sure there are plenty of them). Then its win-win.

It happened to me. 1 hour off. It was related to DST. I missed a meeting because of this. Since then I disable "automatic time from network" on my new phones and have a casio watch. I thought the tower was misconfigured, why do you suppose it's a stingray?

Time-sync is important for mobile operators (there are standards to keep the towers in sync with the correct time) - and a tower out of sync would be noticed.

But not if it is a stingray as that's not managed by the network.

There is a simpler explanation: I once worked an (industrial+officies) site of high-tech company, and they had their own private Cell tower, with phones that only worked on the site; maybe they forgot to update the time. IIRC, small base stations have been deployed at hacker events(CCC) with similar internal-only features.

Happened to me too, but maybe worse: two minutes behind

This was when SMS were still widely used, so that made for very messed up chats since received messages carried the correct timestamp

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