@Luddite wrote:
Someone should correct me as I am no longer infallible, but I think the automatic time zone is not set by Public Mobile but by your phone sensing its location, then retrieving local time from the internet (cellular data or wifi). Seems to be the situation with my devices.
Celular networks do broadcast a time that can update the cell phone device without the need for a data connection. With current smartphones, this might get overidden by the phone's software to use an internet connection to set the time, but the pure ability to set time based on the voice network is still there.
Before the days that smartphones existed, or at least at the time before the widespread popularity of the smartphone, data was rated at a price of usually around $50/MB and it was commonplace for customers to request that the carrier completely block data. Even after blocking cellular data at the account level, the time would still auto update. I've had phones in the past on Bell CDMA, Telus CDMA, Rogers GSM and HPSA, Mobilicity, and Wind, all with no data plan, and some models without wi-fi, and was able to auto-update the device time through the cell network. I think the only network that I ever found not able to do that was Fido GSM way back (pre-2000), when it was necessary to manually type in the time.
When it comes to daylight time savings, most smartphones these days change your time right when the clock would hit 2am, as an auto-programmed event within the phone software. There was a time when daylight savings and the switch back to standard time would result in problems once every six months, because the network would not always push the right time after such a time change. It was standard procedure for people who used their phones as alarm clocks to set the time to manual on that night because the adjusted network time would sometimes not get updated until well into the morning, hours later.
In the case of Rogers, the GSM and HSPA network used to broadcast different times. The GSM network used to have a time that was always about 15 seconds faster than the HSPA network (it might have been the other way around). So, you could be on the GSM network and have your phone display 12:00pm, but if the phone decided to switch over to HSPA, time would appear to go backwards and your phone would then say 11:59am. I wouldn't be surprised if that same time discrepency still exists between the two.
