[tz] Cellphone tz updates often not happening in Israel

L. David Baron dbaron at dbaron.org
Mon Sep 23 20:32:12 UTC 2013


On Monday 2013-09-23 13:07 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> A couple of weeks ago there were widespread reports of
> problems in the tz database's updates getting propagated to
> end users in Israel.  Many cellphones running Android,
> BlackBerry, iOS, and Symbian were still based on tz release
> 2012g or earlier, i.e., they had not updated even to tz
> release 2012h (2012-10-26), much less to the current rules
> for Israel as per tz release 2013d (2013-07-05).

It also seems odd that these phones didn't have their time adjusted
as a result of receiving NITZ messages from cell towers with the
correct UTC offset.  I thought that using time and timezone
information from the cell network was the typical default
configuration on smartphones (which makes having an up-to-date
timezone database less critical).

Are there carriers in Israel that don't broadcast date and offset
information from their cell towers?  Or were the carriers
broadcasting incorrect data?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NITZ doesn't have information on
Israeli carriers, but it also suggests that there are substantial
numbers of mobile networks that don't provide timezone information.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)


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