Wouldn’t it just make sense to define a given hour as UTC 00:00 and then reference that ONE time when communicating? As it stands, were just giving every single time zone two or three different names for seemingly no merit
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The + or – is the difference in hours from utc. Locations may have different names for them like Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, or Hawaii-Aleutian in the US. However they change their difference from utc based on daylight saving time.
Eastern Time in the US is UTC-4 during daylight saving time and UTC-5 during standard time.
>Wouldn’t it just make sense to define a given hour as UTC 00:00 and then reference that ONE time when communicating
The problem with this is that each time zone would essentially have to do the math to convert between UTC and their local time. Say everyone wakes up at 7:00 local time and gets to work at 8:00. Then different offices in different locations would need to say “make sure you get to work at UTC 1:00” or “UTC 2:00” or so on, to match their local time to the UTC reference. It becomes much more confusing in daily life to use a single universal reference for everyday use as opposed to a local time.
There is only one UTC. However, since the time of day is relative to your specific location, you have to have a way to identify local time – which is why the Universal time is used with an indication of how many hours offset the local time is.
The older identifiers of letter codes are not specific enough without knowledge of where the time zone is located, so the + and – system is used.
Time zones exist and pretending they don’t wouldn’t be useful to anyone. Having a universal reference point is handy for communicating what time gaps are. To work out the time gap between two places, you just need to know the UTC offset for each of them.
You are right there is only 1 version. The suffix is addition or subtraction of hours. Eg utc minus 5 is the timezone that is 5 hours behind utc etc.
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