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Wifi time-out OFF by default?

So, it seems the default policy for wifi on this device is never to disconnect itself to save power. The Vibrant defaulted to whenever the screen was off. That makes the default wifi policy between these two devices vastly different. In fact, there isn't even an option on this phone to disconnect from wifi when the screen is shut down. I wonder how this will affect battery life. I may think twice about enabling wifi.

The first thing I did after connecting it to my wifi was go to the wifi advanced settings and set the sleep policy to never. I'm glad it was already off by default. It shows that someone at HTC paid attention to that small detail and how it affected battery life. It greatly helps your battery life in my experience (with the Vibrant), since it's not constantly connecting and disconnecting from wifi which apparently uses more power.

Aspeds2989 said:
The first thing I did after connecting it to my wifi was go to the wifi advanced settings and set the sleep policy to never. I'm glad it was already off by default. It shows that someone at HTC paid attention to that small detail and how it affected battery life. It greatly helps your battery life in my experience (with the Vibrant), since it's not constantly connecting and disconnecting from wifi which apparently uses more power.
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Agree 100%.
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App

Aspeds2989 said:
The first thing I did after connecting it to my wifi was go to the wifi advanced settings and set the sleep policy to never. I'm glad it was already off by default. It shows that someone at HTC paid attention to that small detail and how it affected battery life. It greatly helps your battery life in my experience (with the Vibrant), since it's not constantly connecting and disconnecting from wifi which apparently uses more power.
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Really? How would that *improve* battery life? I would have it to *detract* from battery life. If I'm at home basking in my wireless network, why would I rather have the connection permanent than to have it disconnected when the screen shuts off as it does by default with the Vibrant? If what you say is true, then setting the timeout from the 15 minutes timeout, as I have it now, to full time connection (never timeouts), will actually save on battery? To me, that flies in the face of reason, but then again, stranger things I've come across.

Just hoping for a reply to the above, and perhaps someone can explain why having wifi never time-out even when the screen is off can lead to better battery life?

think about it. having to connect and reconnect everytime you turn on your screen is bound to eat up. if your screen is off its not sucking in massive amounts of data so the battery drain is at a min

Lockeskidney said:
think about it. having to connect and reconnect everytime you turn on your screen is bound to eat up. if your screen is off its not sucking in massive amounts of data so the battery drain is at a min
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Well, it's certainly not intuitive, and I am thinking about it, hence the post. In order to maintain an active wifi connection, there has to be continual pinging back and forth even with no active data connections from the device. Now, we all know that there *is* a lot of data being exchanged when the screen is off - whether it be syncing accounts, retrieving news items, emails, etc. This would all be taking place over a wifi connection by default. It is also my understanding that using your wifi radio consumes more power than your UMTS radio does. However, I'm not entirely sure of that last point.
Isn't it far more intuitive to believe (whether factual or not) that having the wifi radio powered on unnecessarily while in your pocket would consume more power than having it turn off? Even the seasoned users over in the Vibrant forums all recommend setting the wifi to turn off when the screen shuts off, which is a setting not available on the MT4G.
I'd like to believe that how HTC sets the default wifi behavior conserves power, but it sort of flies in the face of reason. I'm also of the belief that the device is set by default the way it is so that callers who use Wifi Calling can always be reached while at home on their wifi network. But, having such a wifi connection setting is actually eating up your battery life if you don't need wifi calling.

Wifi used less power that edge/g3/4g. Having it constantly on wifi with improve your battery life just because when wifi is enabled it shuts off cellular data.

option94 said:
Wifi used less power that edge/g3/4g. Having it constantly on wifi with improve your battery life just because when wifi is enabled it shuts off cellular data.
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Ah, OK, well there you have it. Someone ought to tell those folks over the in the Vibrant forums then. Thanks...

floepie said:
Ah, OK, well there you have it. Someone ought to tell those folks over the in the Vibrant forums then. Thanks...
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I have. I have a vibrant. Ordered the mytouch last night.

Also, can't have WiFi sleeping... otherwise WiFi calling won't work...
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App

use wifi or not?

From a battery perspective, should I use wifi? Most of the time i'm at home or at work where I have wifi. I also have good lte coverage at both. Speed aside, will I save battery by not using wifi or not?

You'll definitely save battery by using wifi when you can connect. I love the speeds over lte, but it is definitely a hog...

i also had boost of battery using WIFI
Using unlimited data plan makes me to consider using 4g, but I found that Wifi consumes much less battery.

Use wifi. The battery savings are huge.

yes i cant stress enough, wifi saves enormous amounts of battery so use it when ever possible. the difference is like night and day.

Compared to 3G
I've been leaving my wifi off since I have unlimited data and the 3G is pretty fast in my area, no 4G yet.
I've had pretty good battery life lately using only 3G, I'll have to do a few tests and see which one and I'm a fairly heavy user I'm approaching 4GB this month and none of that is tethering

3G or Wifi
Tested watching a streaming video of 22 mins
on 3G I lost 13%
on wifi I lost 8%
Wifi wins, of course standby is probably different, if 3G vs wifi loses this badly I'd have to imagine LTE vs Wifi is a slaughter battery wise

Actually I found something interesting...
For some reason, even when I am home using Wifi, the battery drains faster than I thought. Where I live is like a strange signal spot. If I turn off my WiFi I can see my TBolt constantly switching between LTE and 3G, sometimes it stucks on 1xRTT for a while then goes right back to switching between connections. If I am at work (downtown LA) where the LTE is pretty well covered, I still use WiFi at the office, the battery BARELY drain at ALL.
My theory is that even when WiFi is active, the phone somehow STILL does the LTE/EvDO switching on the background does draining the battery.
If somehow the devs or VZW can tell the phone to STICK to EvDO/1xRTT instead of going back and forth with the LTE while WiFi data is on, it'll solve the problem.
Also just FYI, I have the latest radio and BMAF 1.5 remixed.

SteveDusa said:
Actually I found something interesting...
For some reason, even when I am home using Wifi, the battery drains faster than I thought. Where I live is like a strange signal spot. If I turn off my WiFi I can see my TBolt constantly switching between LTE and 3G, sometimes it stucks on 1xRTT for a while then goes right back to switching between connections. If I am at work (downtown LA) where the LTE is pretty well covered, I still use WiFi at the office, the battery BARELY drain at ALL.
My theory is that even when WiFi is active, the phone somehow STILL does the LTE/EvDO switching on the background does draining the battery.
If somehow the devs or VZW can tell the phone to STICK to EvDO/1xRTT instead of going back and forth with the LTE while WiFi data is on, it'll solve the problem.
Also just FYI, I have the latest radio and BMAF 1.5 remixed.
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pretty much correct. at least on the gsm side, when i connect to wifi at home, i can no longer see if the phone is on 3G or EDGE. but it definitely switches back and forth to those networks, while staying on wifi, you just dont see the icon switching, but its definitely happening. i dont see why cdma and 1x would be any different.

if this is the case then why don't you just turn data off when you are on wifi.
^_^_^'s tbolt

EEdaesung said:
if this is the case then why don't you just turn data off when you are on wifi.
^_^_^'s tbolt
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You are absolutly right! How come I never thought of that. Will do that when I get home tonight.
Thanks for the tip!
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App

Better yet get juice defender and automate it . Its very good app. Right now it says I'm almost adding fifty percent on to my battery.

I seem to be bucking the trend here, but LTE is working better for me than wifi. I usually have a good signal, so that's part of it.
The other part is that my wifi may be eating more juice than normal because the TB and my router may not be playing nice together. Ever since I added the TB to the network, I've had to reboot the router every coupla days. Before the TB, it was solid weeks on end.

Has anyone who is still having trouble on with batter on wifi set their wifi sleep policy to "Never" sleep? Mine is set to this and if I am home most of the day I will lose very little battery through out the day.
I believe by default the wifi is set to turn off after a period of time or when the screen is off so during this time I believe you are actually reverting back to using the vzw network. To turn wifi to always on go to settings>wireless>wifi settings>hit menu>advanced. The sleep policy is at the top, change sleep policy to never. This my reduce battery while not connected to wifi so I always use the power control widget to turn my wifi off completely while I am away from the house.

shovelheadhd said:
Has anyone who is still having trouble on with batter on wifi set their wifi sleep policy to "Never" sleep? Mine is set to this and if I am home most of the day I will lose very little battery through out the day.
I believe by default the wifi is set to turn off after a period of time or when the screen is off so during this time I believe you are actually reverting back to using the vzw network. To turn wifi to always on go to settings>wireless>wifi settings>hit menu>advanced. The sleep policy is at the top, change sleep policy to never. This my reduce battery while not connected to wifi so I always use the power control widget to turn my wifi off completely while I am away from the house.
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Oh yeah this is very important, set wifi sleep policy to never greatly increases battery life. Otherwise it switches back to 3g when screen goes off and drains way more battery. This is very important to set this otherwise you wont see the increase.

Is strongly recommend switching to cdma only if yore gonna use WiFi and plan on saving your battery. Otherwise what's the point. I personally don't even bother using WiFi just use LTE only mode. I'm getting better speeds than most WiFi connections using my LTE.
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk

Does Wifi Save Battery vs Cullular connection?

If your connected to wifi and using it, are you gonna get better battery life VS being connected to either 3g or 4g/hspa+?
and Why if so?

Shoot im sorry, this shouldnt be in this forum. I thought I was in the general questions forums. MY bad people. Please move mods.

smashpunks said:
Shoot im sorry, this shouldnt be in this forum. I thought I was in the general questions forums. MY bad people. Please move mods.
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This is the General forum. To answer your question, Yes it would use less battery on WiFi. On a data connection the signal is not a constant and the phone is always looking for a stronger signal.

Thanks, thats what I thought. And ive noticed that connected to wifi my battery lasts a lot longer.

smashpunks said:
Thanks, thats what I thought. And ive noticed that connected to wifi my battery lasts a lot longer.
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yes. And 4g eats your battery.

When I am only using the phone for data, I use WiFi when available. I turn on airplane mode then activate WiFi.

I don't know about that... when I'm on wifi my battery drains like a mofo. Weapon 3.0 ICS theme faux 1.3 kernel.

On every ROM and Kernel I've tried, Wi-Fi uses much, much less battery than 4G. I haven't tried any of the toggles / battery saving apps though so I'm not sure what effect those might have.

NeKr0MAtiK said:
I don't know about that... when I'm on wifi my battery drains like a mofo. Weapon 3.0 ICS theme faux 1.3 kernel.
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Do you disable data when you use wifi?

buru898 said:
Do you disable data when you use wifi?
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He shouldn't have to. If he's draining faster on WiFi then something is screwy with his setup.

On stock, cyanogenmod 7.1, and cyanogenmod 7.1 with various other kernels I've experienced increased battery drain with wi-fi on and connected with the phone sitting at home the entire day. Turn off wi-fi and let it just use the data connection to T-Mobile and I get drastically increased battery times. I'm assuming those of you who get better battery with wi-fi on are in extremely bad signal areas. Also, if you're on cyanogenmod have you turned off the auto wi-fi disconnect when sleeping feature? If you haven't then your battery life when sleeping should be the same as that of wi-fi turned off.

Wi-fi should always be priority if your in range.

Well my personal experience has been that wi-fi eats up battery like crazy. Same thing happens to the other smartphone users I know around here so I was surprised to see that people get better battery times with wi-fi on. Are you guys completely turning off your cellular radio? I don't like the quality and slight delay of wi-fi calling so my cellular radio stays on when I have wi-fi on.

I don't usually notice much difference between wifi and 3g battery drain here (no 4G for tmo here).
As someone already posted, my drain is worst when 3g signal is poor, like when I'm at work and the metal building interferes with everything.
Have you tried checking logs while connected to wifi to see if maybe some app or service goes crazy?

Nothing fishy going on when wi-fi is on. I get about 10-14 hours on battery with wi-fi on and next to no use of the phone vs somewhere around 20+ hours with wi-fi off and similar extremely light use. I keep meaning to do some more standardized testing where I literally don't touch the phone but life gets in the way and I have to make/answer a call or txt or whatever so I can't nail down any hard numbers. Typical experience on a slow day for me is that if I forget my wi-fi is on, my battery will be somewhere in the 3-5% range when I'm getting ready for bed while if I hadn't left it on, I can go to sleep and wake up and it'll still be hanging in there.

GTWalling said:
This is the General forum. To answer your question, Yes it would use less battery on WiFi. On a data connection the signal is not a constant and the phone is always looking for a stronger signal.
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That's true, I've always believed that Wifi eats battery faster because someone(don't remember who) always told me that Wifi uses more battery because it processes data faster, but I always noticed that when I used 4g, it drains a lot faster.
I always blamed it on the ROM, but I can see that it's not the ROM's fault.

Wifi ON. Data OFF?

Hey there.
I use tasker to turn mobile data off as soon as I connect to my Wifi. When I go out of range, it turns mobile data back on.
That works great, the thing is I just read that the OS automatically does that for you, so... Am I being redundant? Is my tasker profile useless?
Thanks!

well, if you are on wifi, you are not connected to mobile data, youre connected to wifi so mobile data has no way of flowing in and out of your phone until you connect to a mobile connection.

rwed said:
Hey there.
I use tasker to turn mobile data off as soon as I connect to my Wifi. When I go out of range, it turns mobile data back on.
That works great, the thing is I just read that the OS automatically does that for you, so... Am I being redundant? Is my tasker profile useless?
Thanks!
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Keep Wifi ON and Mobile Data ON, when your phone is close to a known wifi it will use the wifi instead of data and when you leave the wifi range it will go back to data by itself.

OK, I should have probably added that the purpose of this Tasker profile is to save battery life. As far as I know, not having to be connected to 3G or 4G would consume less power. Right?
EDIT: I mainly ask this for scenarios of really low data coverage. At work I barely have 1 bar, and the radio keeps switching from 2G to 3G and 4G. I'd assume that does indeed consume a lot of power even though I am connected to a Wifi network.
simms22 said:
well, if you are on wifi, you are not connected to mobile data, youre connected to wifi so mobile data has no way of flowing in and out of your phone until you connect to a mobile connection.
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Bumchakalaka said:
Keep Wifi ON and Mobile Data ON, when your phone is close to a known wifi it will use the wifi instead of data and when you leave the wifi range it will go back to data by itself.
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rwed said:
OK, I should have probably added that the purpose of this Tasker profile is to save battery life. As far as I know, not having to be connected to 3G or 4G would consume less power. Right?
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im on lte 100% of the time, and never ever use wifi, and i get 5-6h sot every battery cycle. really, youll get your best battery on the fastest, highest quality signal(data/phone) available for you to use, whichever type of signal it is.

rwed said:
OK, I should have probably added that the purpose of this Tasker profile is to save battery life. As far as I know, not having to be connected to 3G or 4G would consume less power. Right?
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Well if you have Wifi toggled ON and DATA toggled ON too, the wifi would put the data on stand-by mode and when data come in it would put the wifi on stand-by(and you can also go to wifi settings>advanced>wifi optimization[helps with power saving] while wifi is on and running).

Sorry guys, I see I edited my post while you both were replying. See:
EDIT: I mainly ask this for scenarios of really low data coverage. At work I barely have 1 bar, and the radio keeps switching from 2G to 3G and 4G. I'd assume that does indeed consume a lot of power even though I am connected to a Wifi network.
So my point being, data might be put into stand by mode, but my guess is that the phone constantly switching radio modes and having to deal with low signals might consume more power than with data off. Don't you think?
Thanks!
simms22 said:
im on lte 100% of the time, and never ever use wifi, and i get 5-6h sot every battery cycle. really, youll get your best battery on the fastest, highest quality signal(data/phone) available for you to use, whichever type of signal it is.
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Bumchakalaka said:
Well if you have Wifi toggled ON and DATA toggled ON too, the wifi would put the data on stand-by mode and when data come in it would put the wifi on stand-by(and you can also go to wifi settings>advanced>wifi optimization[helps with power saving] while wifi is on and running).
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rwed said:
Sorry guys, I see I edited my post while you both were replying. See:
EDIT: I mainly ask this for scenarios of really low data coverage. At work I barely have 1 bar, and the radio keeps switching from 2G to 3G and 4G. I'd assume that does indeed consume a lot of power even though I am connected to a Wifi network.
So my point being, data might be put into stand by mode, but my guess is that the phone constantly switching radio modes and having to deal with low signals might consume more power than with data off. Don't you think?
Thanks!
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if its constantly jumping to differing signal types, and quality is low when it is connected, then youd probably get better battery life with the data connection off.

simms22 said:
if its constantly jumping to differing signal types, and quality is low when it is connected, then youd probably get better battery life with the data connection off.
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However, he's thinking that you need to turn off mobile data while WiFi is on. This isn't true, it turns off/goes into standby until you need it.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Where you can save a good chunk of battery is disabling WiFi while using data. You also need WiFi always scanning turned off for this to work.
As you have found out data is switched off automatically. The reason some people are doing that now is it might be a temporary fix for some WiFi connectivity issues.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Can data toggling causes battery drain?

Hey guys just a quick question. I already get phenomenal idle drain. I don't drop a single percent overnight in an 8 hr period. Couldn't be happier. I also have no wakelock issues However I want to help battery life while not idle.
So I created a tasker profile that enables data when only in apps that need it like Tapatalk. Then when I exit that app (screen still on) or turn the screen off data shuts off.
My question is if I'm going more harm then good with the constant data toggling. I know it's probably subjective to how much I use these data apps so data gets toggled. Is there a way to test this myself?

Not worth your effort. Don't try to micromanage too much.

thats right, enjoy your device instead.

OK thanks guys

Sandman-007 said:
Hey guys just a quick question. I already get phenomenal idle drain. I don't drop a single percent overnight in an 8 hr period. Couldn't be happier. I also have no wakelock issues However I want to help battery life while not idle.
So I created a tasker profile that enables data when only in apps that need it like Tapatalk. Then when I exit that app (screen still on) or turn the screen off data shuts off.
My question is if I'm going more harm then good with the constant data toggling. I know it's probably subjective to how much I use these data apps so data gets toggled. Is there a way to test this myself?
Click to expand...
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How do you get this?

I would just say to one day use your data toggle, and don't the next day if you're curious. I'm usually curious about these things too. I set my Tasker up so it switches to 3G when I'm connected to my work's wifi. My whole work's area has very strong 3G and very weak LTE so I have bad signal because the phone keeps trying to connect to the LTE network. However, my work's wifi is also not very stable and it keeps disconnected which leads my phone to constantly toggle between 3G and LTE. I'm not sure if this affects battery drain but it felt a bit like a drain. I just ended up manually toggling. But I'm usually curious which what drains the battery more. Since your data would be off when the screen is off and if you're not using wifi you should get very good standby time.