I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this.
I don't have 3g signal or wi-fi at work, but I do have a laptop connected to a network. I use this trick to create an ad-hoc wifi connection from my laptop to my phone in order to get data:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/7785.aspx
I've been using this for a while, for both my Nexus One and Nexus S. On both phones, the battery drains significantly while connected via the ad-hoc connection. The phone idles at 200 or so miliamp/sec according to Current Widget, compared to 7 to 9 mili/amp/sec when idling on regular wifi.
Anyone know what causes this, and if there's a way around it? It seems like the phone is treating the adhoc connection differently than a regular wi-fi hotspot.
On my Defy I actually have a notification when connected to ad-hoc that this has implications on power consumption. So it seems it's normal. As to why this is so, finding out would probably require reading about the low-level workings of wireless networks. I'd guess it's because the two devices connected this way need to stuff themselves, stuff that is normally handled by the access-point.
Thanks for confirming that it's just not me. I guess it's unavoidable. I wonder if the constant increased battery drain diminishes the life of the battery.
Related
Title says it all.
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Sure does not.
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Not even comparable... data takes up tons of battery
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If it's constantly in a loop of trying, unsuccessfully, to connect to a wireless network, I could see it increasing obviously, but in a normal connected state, as the others say, no way as much as mobile.
alright awesome ill keep using wifi
Scott_S said:
If it's constantly in a loop of trying, unsuccessfully, to connect to a wireless network, I could see it increasing obviously, but in a normal connected state, as the others say, no way as much as mobile.
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Scott is right. If you don't have wifi connected it will constantly search for it causing battery drain. If you leave and don't plan on being on wifi I would shut it off so that your phone isn't constantly searching for a network. There are some battery settings in the wifi menu that can help with that though just not very much.
P.S. oops edited sorry Scott lol
Carlrobling said:
...Mud is right...
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I'll take that as a complement.
I disagree, every phone i have seen uses significantly more battery having wifi turned on, I definately notice it on mine, and im talking about being connected to a wifi the entire time. My battery life with wifi on has always been **** compared to it being turned off, Iphone's all of them including 4, droid x, vibrant, captivate, inspire all the same result with wifi enabled.
Do a expierment charge phone to 100% before going to bed, lets say 10 pm to 6 am check battery power lvl, next night enable wifi, I am absolutely certain that u will have a much larger drain.
as for does it drain more while in use than 3g or 4g is another issue, some say it uses less than mobile network to transfer data because a mobile tower can be a few miles away while the router is no more than 200 feet. I personally think wifi still uses more battery, however i do use wifi when available to keep my data usage down. if u disabled 3g altogether then maybe. but with both on u are powering another radio.
jc2470 said:
I disagree, every phone i have seen uses significantly more battery having wifi turned on, I definately notice it on mine, and im talking about being connected to a wifi the entire time. My battery life with wifi on has always been **** compared to it being turned off, Iphone's all of them including 4, droid x, vibrant, captivate, inspire all the same result with wifi enabled.
Do a expierment charge phone to 100% before going to bed, lets say 10 pm to 6 am check battery power lvl, next night enable wifi, I am absolutely certain that u will have a much larger drain.
as for does it drain more while in use than 3g or 4g is another issue, some say it uses less than mobile network to transfer data because a mobile tower can be a few miles away while the router is no more than 200 feet. I personally think wifi still uses more battery, however i do use wifi when available to keep my data usage down. if u disabled 3g altogether then maybe. but with both on u are powering another radio.
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If you're saying that having WiFi on uses more battery than having WiFi off, which is how I read the first part of your post, I'd have to say you absolutely correct.
I think the question was whether WiFi used more battery than mobile data.
Mobile data uses more battery because its constantly trying to look for a better connection. E/3G/4G/ETC...
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according to alot of other post about this same issue say wifi uses more battery either way because your 3g /4g radio is still on when using wifi
Both right
If you have WiFi always on, constantly polling for it, when not connected, you will use >battery. If you are connected to WiFi, and thus not polling all the time, <battery usage.
I use Llama to disable my WiFi when I am out not using GPS. It knows I leave home or work based on location as tringulated by the cell towers, thus GPS doesn't have to be on. Your phone is always polling for towers anyway, even with data shut off, so this does not use any battery to speak of. There are a lot of towers here in my basic hood, so Llama seems to identified that I leave home from 100-1000 meters, depending which direction I go.
You will use less battery if you shut off WiFi polling while you have no chance to connect to Wifi, that is for sure!
I use Llama to shut off and on all sorts of stuff based on location or a set of conditions. It is all logic based: If condition A exists, perform B toggle. Works great for me in an area with lots of towers so location at home vs. work vs. out is determined rather easily and accurately in my experience.
Edit: other conditions available include days of the week, time of day, headset or bluetooth enabled, etc.
Wifi definitively uses less battery than 3g from all the tests I've done and common experiences around the forum. Its not even close.
Can you change the wifi interval in the build.prop file to have it search after a longer delay? I know on mine it is set for 15 (seconds)?
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On my Galaxy Nexus and Droid 1 before that, bluetooth and wifi were nowhere near the top of my list of battery drainers. On my Prime and now my Infinity they are the top 2 when used, is the common for all tablets? Seems ridiculous that these functions draw more power than the screen.
I think it's a bug in the software, there is no way that Wifi eats up that much battery.
Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF700T
Chances are its a bug that will have to be ironed out.
Lets use the example of a laptop. If your connected to a wifi and roaming around there is actually a setting you can change that will determine how agressively the wireless adapter searches for a new network. The more aggressive it is the more often it will search for different access points and try to connect to them. More polling = more cycles = more power used.
If the wireless adapter in the tablet searches for a network to connect to, or a stronger open network that it could connect to, say, every 3 seconds it would be a tremendous battery drain. The same thing for Bluetooth, if its searching for saved devices (say for instance, your bluetooth headphones) every three seconds it will drain your battery pretty quick.
Now if the polling rate was changed, say, to every minute, or two minutes, or five minutes, or whatever, then it would dramatically reduce the power used by the radios.
Additionally, the transmitting power used for those radios can play a big factor in battery drain. If you are three feet from the access point and the wireless adapter is transmitting at full power thats going to be a waste of battery. It could, theoretically, determine you are close to the AP and drop the transmit power down to, say, half, and reduce the power used greatly.
Im guessing that the proper balance between performance and power savings has not yet been implimented in the tablets. Either its "All or Nothing" which, in my opinion, is kind of rediculious. Look for updates from Asus and they should have this fixed hopefully sooner than later. Custom roms should also be able to tweak this. There ARE settings in android that can address this, its just a matter of will Asus give us access to them without voiding our warranties.
To further back up this idea, consider this: My SGS2 has the ability to share its 3G connection via wifi. If i use this feature my battery will drain VERY quickly, easially within the hour my battery will be dead. Why? Increased wifi / 3g traffic, more cycles used, more power going to the antennas to transmit and recieve signals at a greater frequency. Using custom firmwares its quite easy to tweak the antennas for performance or power savings.
I've just switched broadband provider and have noticed that my battery life is just awful compared to how it was with the previous WiFi connection.I could normally go a full day on heavy use and still have around 30% at the end of the night. The phone has been mostly screen off for about 5 hours and it has went from full charge to 16%.
I can confirm it is definately using a 5ghz signal as I logged into the router page and it was listed as a 5ghz connection.
Does anyone know how to make the Z3 run on a 2ghz connection instead?
I'm rooted (locked bootloader) and have xposed if anyone knows any modules which might help
This has to be set on your Router not on your phone.
So currently wifi kills more battery than 3g!
its been on an hour and already accounts for 13% of todays power use.
anyone know how to fix this bug?
irzero said:
So currently wifi kills more battery than 3g!
its been on an hour and already accounts for 13% of todays power use.
anyone know how to fix this bug?
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this is hard but it could be many things, even other devices on your network in fact that's where I would first look, some sharing setting or some powersaving on or off setting in your router
irzero said:
So currently wifi kills more battery than 3g!
its been on an hour and already accounts for 13% of todays power use.
anyone know how to fix this bug?
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Click to collapse
5Ghz or 2.4Ghz?
Supposedly 5Ghz would drain more if you aren't close enough to the source!
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2.4 and my edge has no problems
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Check for am app that's throwing lots of wakelocks or alarms when on Wi-Fi. Some apps think they have free reign to check in all they want when you're not using cell data.
@OP
Had the same issue beginning 5.1.1. Turned out keeping the phone only on 5GHz instead of both 2.4 & 5GHz wifi did the trick for me. Try it out if you also have a dual-band wifi router.
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What's the best way to find out with out root
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Many Playstore apps exist to measure wifi strength & effectiveness. "Wifi Overview 360", "Network Signal Info Pro".
My Sammy S6 has a much better wifi hardware than my cheap, old phones. But my home wifi routers are the same.
Wifi transmissions are bothered by:
1) poor hardware (old, cheap phones, etc), which drains battery with weak signals.
2) radio interference rubbish between the main sender, and your wifi receiver.
3) orientation of the two aerials, in relation to each other; horizontal, angled, vertical, ... (especially if 1), 2) above are bad
4) Whether the receiver unit is facing the main unit, sideways, backwards, frontwards, etc. On poor quality hardware, this is very important.
Being very crippled myself much of my time is just lying in my (nursing) bed. My Samsung Note Pro 12.2 floats above my head, in bed. Smartphones are affected if my head gets between the unit and the main unit.
My main wifi unit is about 20 yards/ meters away, but transmitting diagonally through a thick, metal-rod reinforced, load bearing wall. So I have a hardwired ethernet cable linked to another wifi unit under my bed, getting a faster, less power-wasting signal.
I have this on my work WiFi it drains the battery really quickly even idle it is about 1% per 5mins whilst connected to WiFi. On 3/4g it is significantly less drain.
But at home I don't have the issue battery life is good even on wifi.
It'd be nice to resolve it, have had it since I got my s6 in may so following this thread closely.
I opened my own thread back then which explains my experience a bit more:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3106313
I have Wifi set to turn off when the phone sleeps. During the evening, that usually results in the Wifi being active for about 30% of the time. Lately, (probably after a recent Google Play Services update), I noticed my Wifi is active 100% of the time. Anyone else notice this?
Lol, just noticed the same thing. For some reason it displays wifi as always on for me as well. Doesn't affect my battery life tho (not noticing it)
Sammath said:
Lol, just noticed the same thing. For some reason it displays wifi as always on for me as well. Doesn't affect my battery life tho (not noticing it)
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OK good to know its just not me.
It's "on" but only connects when in an area where it has already connected before.
p51d007 said:
It's "on" but only connects when in an area where it has already connected before.
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Yes I believe the behavior has not changed. However in my battery apps it's now showing WiFi active all the time. Previously, on would be 100% but active usually 50%. Now it's 100%
Maybe the app doesn't shut down the wifi connection completely but stops it from sending any data. Maybe the app justs shut down the wifi from ping-ing periodically but keeps the wifi one 100%.
Just my two cents
Wifi is on, but doesn't use that much power. It most likely is pinging at time, to see if a previously connected
wifi access point is available. I leave mine on 24/7, and haven't had any battery issues. In fact, with it on all the
time, my battery life is better because if I'm in an area where I've connected to wifi previously, it disables the
4G connection for data, and uses the wifi. Depending on your 4G connection, wifi could save your battery
life, since the amount of power required for the data part of the 4G signal, is dependent on your signal strength.
Low signal strength, more power required to connect.
p51d007 said:
Wifi is on, but doesn't use that much power. It most likely is pinging at time, to see if a previously connected
wifi access point is available. I leave mine on 24/7, and haven't had any battery issues. In fact, with it on all the
time, my battery life is better because if I'm in an area where I've connected to wifi previously, it disables the
4G connection for data, and uses the wifi. Depending on your 4G connection, wifi could save your battery
life, since the amount of power required for the data part of the 4G signal, is dependent on your signal strength.
Low signal strength, more power required to connect.
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Great post thank you! The question is more out of curiosity since this behavior wasnt happening before. BTW, I think I figured out whats going on. In Location Settings, under the 3 dot menu I had Wifi Scanning option turned off. For whatever reason, the option was turned back on. No idea how this can happen but I disabled it again.