Do some mobile networks drain phone battery faster than others?

[Julian]

I just switched the network plan & SIM on my iPhone 12 Pro Max about a week ago from Three to Lebara (Lebara uses the Vodafone network) and my battery seems to be draining at least 50% faster than it did when I had the Three SIM card installed. I had and still have have my settings locked to 4G so there is no 5G traffic involved.

Am I just imagining this and is it most likely to be down to me having a somewhat more battery-heavy usage pattern over the last week without realising it or can there be differences between networks? Are the licensed frequency bands subdivided with an allocated sub-band per provider so for instance even when both are providing 4G to my phone Three and Vodafone might be using sufficiently different frequencies to affect power consumption? Is some other battery-affecting effect at play? Has anyone else experienced a similar effect?

- Julian

[Mike88]

From Google:

"Lower signal means your phone has to pump more power.................... for it to keep a live signal."

[Mike4]

From Google:

"Lower signal means your phone has to pump more power.................... for it to keep a live signal."

Aslo signal quality. A dirty signal requires more handshaking with the transmitter than a clean signal or something along those lines. Or so I was once told by a customer of mine who said he writes comms software for things like my phone and card terminal.

[Infrasonic]

I've got two phones with SIM only deals, one on Thee and one on Vodafone.
I need Vodafone for my trips to the sticks where Three coverage is very patchy. The battery use on my Three phone is noticeably more aggressive with weak or no signal.

The other variable you have is you are using an MVNO rather than dealing direct with the network. You don't always get a full fat service with MVNO's, it's one of the reasons they are cheaper...Have a look at the user forums and see if it's mentioned as an issue.

[AF62]

Poor signal can significantly impact battery life as the phone struggles to keep connected, and with smartphones whether you are using it or not it will still be exchanging data for apps, the phone, etc.

I recently changed to O2 as I wanted to add a mobile phone connection to my Apple watch (I had changed from a WiFi only version to a cellular version), but the coverage at the gym I use was shockingly bad so the watch would use 50% of battery power in an hour (normally it is 50% full still at 11pm). I cancelled with O2 within the 14 day cooling off period and moved to EE, and it is day vs night with their service. Excellent coverage at the gym and the battery is back to normal.

Are the licensed frequency bands subdivided with an allocated sub-band per provider so for instance even when both are providing 4G to my phone Three and Vodafone might be using sufficiently different frequencies to affect power consumption?

Potentially, but it is more likely that it is the phone is being served by a different mast which may not be providing the same 'power' of signal.

There can be issues with frequencies (https://www.4g-lte.net/about/lte-freque ... -networks/) with an MVNO* not being able to use all the frequencies the network they are using can. This used to be a case with Band 20 being kept for the network customers (same as WiFi calling and VoLTE), but these differences are disappearing.

*MVNO for those who don't know the acronym is Mohile Virtual Network Operator, who don't own the network like EE, Three, O2, and Vodafone, but pay to use that network. Some are independent of the network operator such as Asda and Lebara, and some are owned by the network such as Plusnet and BT Mobile are part of EE (or EE is part of BT), Smarty is owned by Three, Giffgaff is owned by O2, and Voxi is owned by Vodaphone. The network owned MVNOs allow the network to provide a 'Tesco value' product whilst maintaining higher prices on the 'pure' network service.

[Julian]

Sorry, I really should have mentioned it in my first post, I can't think why I didn't, but based on all of the Three/Vodafone coverage maps, the signal strength indicator on my iPhone, and the perceived experience with page & map loading speeds the signal strength I'm seeing on the Vodafone network in the areas I frequent is significantly stronger than the signal I had with my Three SIM.

In fact clutching at straws I did idly wonder whether the seemingly much weaker 4G signal on my Three service might be an explanation for why it was less demanding on the battery. I of course understand that weaker signal = more battery drain but presumably that is only to the point where the phone says "I give up, I'm going to connect via 3G instead" where, as I understand it, 3G uses a fair amount less power than 4G. With the notch taking up most of the space previously used for the status bar on iOS the newer iPhones don't show 3G/4G status on the home screen so I'm never really aware of what network (3G or 4G) I'm connecting to but the fairly painful experience I often had loading pages or map segments with my Three service when out and about certainly would be consistent with it dropping to 3G.

- Julian

[Infrasonic]

Another complication is that although there are four mobile network companies there is increasing sharing of infrastructure going on.
Voda/O2 and EE/Three.
So effectively long term it will be two mobile networks. However as the sums involved are so vast there is a lot of political manoeuvring between the various parties (including legal action), spectrum gets traded (sometimes at the request of the regulator) et al.
All very muddy and difficult for a consumer to work out what is the best route to QoS v value for money.

You can get free SIMS with limited data allowances and life spans to get a rough idea of quality/issues, but again bear in mind that the networks can control bandwidth on a per user basis, so what may be great one day may be awful the next in the exact same location. ( I use 150GB+ of 4G data a month on Three so have suffered with this, even 'off peak' when contention ratios are less of an issue...).

[AleisterCrowley]

All else being equal having a poorer signal will drain the battery faster (the adaptive power control will ramp up the transmit power to maintain the link with the base station)
Also, if you are on a location area boundary you can get a situation where there are more location update messages
So, different network, different drain...
The different operator allocations within, for example, the 4G spectrum block will not affect power consumption. Using 3G vs 4G will result in different power consumption profiles (but don't know how much)

Check you haven't got any power-hungry apps running in the background. I think there's a way to do this. I've got a fairly new iPhone Xr and haven't bothered finding my way round it yet

[AleisterCrowley]

Another complication is that although there are four mobile network companies there is increasing sharing of infrastructure going on.
Voda/O2 and EE/Three.
So effectively long term it will be two mobile networks. ...

In the case of Voda/O2 it's MORAN - so the operators share physical sites but there are separate radios/frequency bands (with shared power/baseband/transmission backhaul)
So you could have one operator with 4G on L800, and the other with 4G on L800 and L2100 bands

[Infrasonic]

Check you haven't got any power-hungry apps running in the background. I think there's a way to do this. I've got a fairly new iPhone Xr and haven't bothered finding my way round it yet

Yeah modern phones with up to date OS' generally have a global 'battery saver' mode where they will hibernate non essential apps.
It's worth checking what they consider to be 'non essential' though and manually overriding if needs be.
I need all my messaging and email apps to be fully active for instance, so had to intervene.

[AF62]

Another complication is that although there are four mobile network companies there is increasing sharing of infrastructure going on.
Voda/O2 and EE/Three.
So effectively long term it will be two mobile networks. ...

In the case of Voda/O2 it's MORAN - so the operators share physical sites but there are separate radios/frequency bands (with shared power/baseband/transmission backhaul)
So you could have one operator with 4G on L800, and the other with 4G on L800 and L2100 bands

Exactly the issue where I live. Vodafone is a perfect signal with fast download speeds. O2 is barely any coverage with shockingly bad download speeds as they admit their network is overloaded in this area.

All very muddy and difficult for a consumer to work out what is the best route to QoS v value for money.

Absolutely.

O2 was cheap but their coverage and capacity was poor for me. Three is cheap but their overseas call centres are shockingly bad. Vodafone has great coverage, but their basic plans no longer include roaming and their full plans that do are eyewatering. EE is dearer than O2 or Three and although their coverage is better than those it is slightly worse than Vodafone but includes EU roaming.

And if you want cellular service on an Apple watch you are limited to EE, O2, and Vodafone, as neither Three nor any of the MVNOs offer it.

[AleisterCrowley]

User experience of a network depends on;
The infrastructure the network has in place (site capacity/which bands are used for which technology etc)
The user's phone - which bands it will support, how good the radio/baseband is - some phones are 'deafer' than others...
The phones used by other users in the coverage area, and the demands they make on the network

[Bminusrob]

The early comments are a pretty accurate summary of the problem - weak and/or "dirty" signal. I also find that being out on the road drains the battery more quickly than being at home, so at the end of a day at home, I have 50-60% battery left, but if I am out for the day, the battery can drop to 10-15%. This is because the phonehas to work harder when switching between cells, but the amount of power used is very significant.

[Julian]

I'm beginning to think that the difference in battery life might be down to WiFi calling which I had on my Three plan but don't have on my Lebara plan because Vodafone doesn't enable it for Lebara customers.

My issue isn't signal strength, Vodafone has a significantly stronger signal in my home, and it isn't the effect of moving about because with my phone sat unused on my desk the whole day (12 hours or so) I used to get about 5 - 10% drain over 12 hours with Three vs about 15 - 20% drain with Lebara.

What I'm thinking is that if what the networks call "Wi-Fi calling" is more than just that and is more of a "virtual mast" thing, which I think it might be(*), then with my old Three plan when I was at home on my Wi-Fi network maybe even though I wasn't actually making or receiving any calls the regular background handshake traffic (or at least the vast majority of it) was going over my WiFi to some virtual mast on the network rather than over the 4G radio. If true that would be way more energy efficient than connecting to the real mast. In effect my phone was half way to being in airplane mode most of the time (since during this pandemic I have been at home most of the time).

(*) The fact that there is no app needed to enable Wi-Fi calling, rather it is a basic setting in the iPhone's settings app, makes me think it is a basic feature of the mobile network software stack that some operators support and others don't (or don't enable for their MVNOs). If that is the case then, at least if it was me, implementing it not as some special case for voice calls but instead implementing a virtual mast on the internet that a client (a phone with Wi-Fi calling enabled and connected to an adequate Wi-Fi network) would connect to in preference to a physical mast would seem far more elegant and probably much simpler and cleaner to implement since it's only affecting the lower layers of the network stack. It also cuts down traffic on the network operator's physical masts by offloading as much traffic from them as possible (admittedly at the expense of additional load on the virtual mast(s) but it is easier to scale a server farm than to scale physical mast capacity) and it would also give the user the battery saving benefits I'm speculating about.

If this is the answer then, although glad to have solved a potential mystery, I'm actually a bit disappointed. I've been pretty obsessed with battery life ever since my first smart phone and still yearn for the day when I can go away on a long weekend without needing to worry about packing a charger because I know my battery will hold up. I thought I was getting there with the more recent iPhone 11 Pro Max and 12 Pro Max where I was seeing 4, 5 or even 6 days of usage between charges but if my theory is correct then that good battery life was basically an illusion due to the benefits of Wi-Fi connectivity when at home and as soon as I went on that 3 or 4 day long weekend I would have seen the ugly truth that multi-day battery life on most smart phones isn't a reality yet.

Maybe when I get round to it I'll get another free Three PAYG SIM and do a few experiments with WiFi calling on and off just to see if that is the issue. Since I'll be doing it at home I'll put my Lebara SIM into a spare phone so that I still get calls on my main number. If it's not down to Wi-Fi calling and I do suddenly get back to half the battery drain I'm getting with Lebara I'd either port my number back to Three and switch to a more cost-effective plan or maybe Smarty (on the Three network, in fact fully owned by Three I believe, and does offer WiFi calling). I really do want as much battery life as possible.

- Julian