Steve,
Firstly, thank you for your reply and all you do for these forums.
The date is showing in the system status page of the web interface. My Dect phones have to have their clocks set manually. I suspect my FW version is out of date because maintenance lapsed. The update of firmware was set to disabled, which I suspect is done by the mother ship, but would not know for sure.
I don't really think my timezone is relevant to finding a solution. It's likely the same as yours if you live in Washington State. It's appropriate for my location. You just have to trust that a 2016 date is plainly wrong.
My DNS is already with Google. with the same values as quoted above, and I'd already tried
us.pool.ntp.org as one of the variants. I merely tried the IP address of a known server as a means of testing I wasn't up against a DNS issue.
So, as I suspected, the solution appears to be starting from scratch.
I want to take exception to your use of the word failed. I think it is unwarranted.
Thank you again for responding to my post.