[riobard]

Do smartphones get their time from GPS?

[kube-system]

I believe they usually get it from the network.

[riobard]

That was my impression as well but now I’m puzzled about why. Since most smartphones have GPS builtin why not get time from GPS?

[becauseiam]

Mobile basebands already get the local time and UTC offset when connecting to a tower, there's no need to power up the GPS antenna and receiver separately.

[jlgaddis]

Mostly because 1) your phone is getting time from the tower anyways (they have to be closely sync'd) and 2) GPS doesn't always work very well -- especially indoors.

[riobard]

So every cell tower runs an NTP server?