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3GPP2 C.S0002-A section 1.3 "CDMA System Time":
All base station digital transmissions are referenced to a common CDMA system-wide time scale that uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) time scale, which is traceable to, and synchronous with, Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). GPS and UTC differ by an integer number of seconds, specifically the number of leap second corrections added to UTC since January 6, 1980. The start of CDMA System Time is January 6, 1980 00:00:00 UTC, which coincides with the start of GPS time.
System Time keeps track of leap second corrections to UTC but does not use these corrections for physical adjustments to the System Time clocks.
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I'm pretty sure the only use of leap seconds in CDMA is for converting system time to customary local time, along with the daylight-time indicator and time-zone offset also contained in the sync channel message.
Edit: C.S0005-E section 2.6.1.3 says the mobile station shall store most of the fields of the sync channel message; it may store leap second count, local time offset, and daylight time indicator. This suggests that these fields aren't really that important for talking CDMA.
No link with leap second till proven.
Also, without knowing more about what exactly went wrong with your phone, it's possible other infrastructure within the network was unstable, signalling equipment, etc. I can't remember exactly, but I think some of the CDMA equipment at my previous company had a leap second problem previously. And the equipment is no longer being maintained or patched really.
Anyway, of three different module vendors, two got leap handling wrong. Then our own code had its own leap bugs, on top of the OS (Solaris) timekeeping bugs such as clock jumps and timezone update issues. Good times.
Doubtful. :) I've observed a similar outage at the last leapsecond (and in that case, dropped me off a call-- which is why I even checked this time.)
It's just so nice to get that extra bit of sunlight in the evening.
You'd have to switch the "seconds since epoch" count to TAI, and that would cause new formatting bugs because all kinds of software assumes that the minute changes on a multiple of 60 seconds since the epoch.
I think if there were such a thing as a different kind of epoch time that literally actually is "seconds since epoch" it would help a lot and work like you suggest.
It sounds like in your scenario, you would prefer Unix time to instead include the leap second, so that no rollback or time smearing behavior would need to occur. I believe the reason it does not has to do with simplicity: current systems rely on a day being 86,400 seconds, making each year (regardless of leap days) a multiple of 86,400. Leap seconds break this simple assumption. While it would be simple for a new time formatting system to take leap seconds into account, it is not so simple to go and retrofit all of the existing systems for a new formatting standard, and convince so many different groups of developers to change that much code while also agreeing with one another about the changes.
Besides: Even expensive commercial time keeping devices frequently mishandle leap seconds. History suggests that we are underestimating how difficult they are to get right in complex systems.
It's absurd that we continue to keep subjecting ourselves to these disruptions and the considerable amount of work that goes into handling leap seconds for the systems that aren't disrupted by them.
Leap seconds serve no useful purpose. Applications that care about solar time care usually care about the local solar time, while UT1 is a 'mean solar time' that doesn't really have much physical meaning (it's not a quantity that can be observed anywhere, but a model parameter).
It would take on the order of 4000 years for time to slip even one hour. If we found that we cared about this thousands of years from now: we could simply adopt timezones one hour over after 2000 years, existing systems already handle devices in a mix of timezones.
[And a fun aside: it appears likely that in less than 4000 years we would need more than two leapseconds per year, sooner if warming melts the icecaps. So even the things that correctly handle leapseconds now will eventually fail. Having to deal with the changing rotation speed of the earth eventually can't be avoided but we can avoid suffering over and over again now.]
There are so many hard problems that can't just easily be solved that we should be spending our efforts on. Leapseconds are a folly purely made by man which we can choose to stop at any time. Discontinuing leapseconds is completely backwards compatible with virtually every existing system. The very few specialized systems (astronomy) that actually want mean solar time should already be using UT1 directly to avoid the 0.9 second error between UTC and UT1. For all else that is required is that we choose to stop issuing them (a decision of the ITU), or that we stop listening to them (a decision of various technology industries to move from using UTC to TAI+offset).
The recent leap smear moves are an example of the latter course but a half-hearted one that adds a lot of complexity and additional failure modes.
(In fact for the astronomy applications that leap seconds theoretically help they _still_ add additional complication because it is harder to apply corrections from UTC to an astronomical time base due to UTC having discontinuities in it.)