4g versus 5g plan and battery drain

[cbPM51]

On a 4g enabled phone, if i move from a 4g to 5g plan, will it effect my battert drain?

[cbPM51]

On my 4g phone, when subscribed to 4g plan

77mbps is reduced to 55 mb when i am on battery save mode.

So i assume that on 5g plan and speeds 

at/over 100 mb, my battery is going to be working harder, and draining faster.

Does this sound logical?

[Korth_]

I see what you're saying.

I haven't played around with 5G plans, yet.

But I have observed that - once the throttles are active, after the first 2-3 business days - my speedtests of 4G phones on "4G speed" (LTE) plans consistently measured around 99.5mbps to 100.5mbps in my city. That's only a 0.5% margin, a surprisingly tight tolerance. The sort of tolerance you don't get unless you install overkill machinery, you spend a lot of money to make sure you don't have to "waste" a little money.

So I sort of assumed a 5G phone on a 4G plan would get the same throttle.

I disregard the first few days when the throttle is not yet applied. They're not really representative 5G phones or of "3G" plans and "4G" plans, they're simply whatever maximum throughput can be sustained between your phone and the local network. Woe to the fools who immediately run speedtests on 250MB or 1GB plans, they can burn away all their data in a minute if their phone and their local network are fast enough.

[DennyCrane]

@Korth_ You can still get "5G" speed on the 4G network. PM's 4G network is capable of speeds greater than 100Mbps, just like their 5G network is capable of speeds greater than 250Mbps. PM intentionally throttles you in both situations.

So even though the OP only has a 4G phone, if they subscribe to a 5G plan they will still get access to higher speeds, with no impact on their battery.

[Korth_]

Yes, 5G requires more power because more radio bands are active, more signal processing is done, more work is put onto the processor and memory. So 5G drains battery charge faster.

How much more power and how much faster depends on a few things: the power efficiencies built into the phone, the way the phone manufacturer set things up, the way the network set things up. The very minimum you should expect is that if your phone is pushing 250mbps then it's working 2.5 times faster and harder than it would be while pushing 100mbps. Cellular radio takes up a lot of power, at the very least the steady 150mW being transmitting half the time. The fancy silicon might be able to standby for days but it needs a lot of power when it's actually forced to wake up all those processor cores and ramp them up to full speeds. Volatile memory is not an insignificant power bill on the battery, that's why mobile operating systems minimize RAM loading and store it in NVRAM when they can. The display consumes a good chunk of power as well. And all these things tend to be active when mobile data is being consumed - people don't passively download stuff while their devices are plugged into a charger - people do demand 5G-speed mobile data when they're running heavy multiplayer games or watching/casting hours of movies or scrolling through the endless videobox distractions which litter social media sites - ie, they use 5G data when everything is running and sucking battery power at full blast.

And note that not all phones are equipped with 5G chips and not all of those which are 5G-capable can actually achieve maximum 5G speeds (indeed, there's even a few cheap lemons with 5G-rated SoCs which can't even perform at standard LTE speeds, lol).

I don't know firsthand (because iDon't iPhone), but some websites claim that iPhones have noticeably or surprisingly short battery life when using 5G service.

https://www.androidauthority.com/does-5g-use-more-battery-3234940/

https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/21/5g-iphone-battery-life-impact/

[Korth_]

---

@hTideGnow wrote:

Hi @cbPM51 

if yours is a 4G phone and not 5G phone, you can subscribe to 5G plan , but you cannot access 5G network.  however, you will get better speed using the 4G network with a 5G plan, upto 250Mbps

Since you are still using a 4G network and not 5G, there won't be battery drain problem

---

That makes no sense. In communications, the chain is as strong as its weakest link - you'll get the fastest speed that the slowest component can provide.

If you have a 4G phone on a 4G plan, you'll get 4G speed (100mbps).

If you have a 4G phone on a 5G plan, or if you have a 5G phone on a 4G plan, you'll get 4G speed (100mbps).

If you have a 5G phone on a 5G plan, you'll get 5G speed (250mbps).

[DennyCrane]

Your plan does not dictate which network you connect to or the associated battery drain, it is only dictates max speed. If your phone is only 4G capable anyway, a 5G plan will have zero impact on your battery life.

[Handy1 · Accepted solution]

@cbPM51no but having phone set to 5G will drain battery faster and make the phone run warmer  then having phone set to 4G/LTE and and even on LTE being in 5G plan it’s still possible to get faster speeds of 100mbs of. 4G plan 

[hTideGnow]

Hi @cbPM51 

if yours is a 4G phone and not 5G phone, you can subscribe to 5G plan , but you cannot access 5G network.  however, you will get better speed using the 4G network with a 5G plan, upto 250Mbps

Since you are still using a 4G network and not 5G, there won't be battery drain problem