From: wollman@bimajority.org   
      
   To article , The Moderator   
   appended:   
      
   > I used to work in the VZ engineering group that handled SS7 and   
   > Timing. The Engineer who worked on timing had a favorite joke:   
   > whenever anyone asked him what time it was, he'd say "Nobody knows!"   
      
   See, that was the great thing about IS-95/IS-2000: if you didn't get   
   the time synchronization within 15 microseconds, it just wouldn't   
   work.  (Well, it would appear to work, but calls would be dropped at   
   every handoff, which would make customers angry.)  That's also why you   
   could build a timecode receiver to use the signal without a   
   subscription.  (GSM has a time feature, but it's "wall clock time at   
   the MTSO", not a rigorously derived timebase.)  There's nothing else   
   in telephony that depends *as a business requirement* on that level of   
   clock synchronization.   
      
   I have at times suspected Qualcomm engineers of designing IS-95   
   intentionally as a way of tricking telcos into investing in a   
   high-quality time distribution infrastructure for the country.  But   
   it's all going away now.   
      
   -GAWollman   
      
   --   
   Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,   
   wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is   
   Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."   
   my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)