We're in the Future in Western Nebraska

September 20, 2010 1:36 PM

I've traveled through the Nebraska panhandle three times this summer, and each time my cell phone clock jumped two hours ahead of what it should have said (to the equivalent of Eastern Time). Can you explain it?

While traveling in western Nebraska three different times this summer (stretched over 3-4 months), I noticed that the time on my cell phone would be wrong each time. Specifically, it happened when I was in the vicinity of the panhandle: once while traveling west from Alliance to Chadron, once while traveling east from Merrill through Scottsbluff to Ogallala, and just recently while traveling west on I-80 past Ogallala.

I should be in Mountain Time there, but my cell phone clock would indicate the time as the equivalent of Eastern Time. If it was 5:00pm Mountain, my cell phone would say 7:00pm. This was not a one-time thing. It happened each time I was specifically in the panhandle area of Nebraska. It did not happen when I would move from Central Time to Mountain Time- it made that change successfully. It was when I was in the panhandle area that the clock would just change to the equivalent of Eastern Time. When I crossed over the border to Wyoming or South Dakota, the time would change to Mountain Time within a few miles.

Even if that part of Nebraska does not observe DST (which it does), it would then be an hour behind DST, right? So that doesn't account for why the time was two hours ahead.

It really, really confused me as a traveler. I would change my car clock forward and backward with the time changes, but I was trying to use my cell phone as an alarm clock. Staying in the panhandle area meant that I had do a lot of guesswork and hope that the time on my cell phone didn't change itself back to the correct(?) time in the night. Which it didn't.

My cell phone carrier is AT&T.

posted by aabbbiee to Travel & Transportation around Nebraska (7 answers total)

My guess is that the cell towers in the area were off, possibly due to someone over-correcting for Daylight Savings (you could report that to AT&T). If the time was updating automatically, the phone was getting it from the cell towers.

What is the model of your phone? When I had a blackberry, I could change the phone's time display from "network" to "phone". Network meant it got the local time from a nearby cell tower periodically. Phone meant that it functioned as a watch would where I set the time and it kept time by itself, usually losing a few minutes per week. If you find yourself with this problem again, see if you can find that setting on your phone and keep it on Phone.
posted by soelo at 2:09 PM on September 20, 2010

I had a similar problem recently. I live in the East and when we traveled to Oregon in August, near Crater Lake, my sister's iPhone read Mountain Time instead of West Coast, and then a couple hours later, my iPhone started to read as Central Time. Lasted like that for about a whole day. As iPhone users, we're also on AT&T.
posted by yeti at 2:58 PM on September 20, 2010

This happened to me while I was driving in an extremely rural part of Wyoming recently, and it's also happened in various parts of North Dakota. My carrier is Verizon, and I've always just assumed that the cell towers were off somehow. Presumably the error wasn't noticed because of the low population of the areas in question.
posted by easy, lucky, free at 4:15 PM on September 20, 2010

I know on some smart phones you can turn time synchronization off so it will not change time zones even when picking up a tower in another time zone. Check your connection settings for this option (or look in user manual or internet).
posted by sandyp at 4:28 PM on September 20, 2010

I noticed that the time was way off (like an hour and 34 minutes, or something random like that) in Cheyenne, Wyoming on my iPhone about 6 months ago. I used the iPhone AT&T app to report an issue and explained what was happening and it was fixed the next time I traveled in the same area.

(OTOH, I have reported many spots with poor coverage and it's never been fixed / improved. YMMV)
posted by icebourg at 4:32 PM on September 20, 2010

This happened to me recently when driving between Salt Lake City Utah and Elko Nevada. When I hit the line between time zones I wound up in a different time zone entirely. It was really weird and all cleared up by the time I got to Elko. I was driving a rental car and didn't know if the car's clock was right; I had to call someone to figure out what time it was. I figure it is something that happens in rural areas on time zone borders, but I never did figure out exactly why it was happening.
posted by jessamyn at 7:53 PM on September 20, 2010

I don't think it matters what *your* carrier is - I recently visited curaçao and my iPhone picked up the correct local time from the local carriers, regardless of which carrier I roamed with, and for sure my own carrier has no coverage on the island. Of course, flying to curaçao means having the phone switched off during a flight, not actually crossing a time zone line with the phone turned on. Also, I don't know if the phone picked up the local time from the GSM signals, or if it picked it up from my GPS location. Sometimes these smart phones are too smart.
posted by DreamerFi at 3:15 AM on September 21, 2010