How Much More Power Does 5G Consume Over 4G? Redmi Has Answer (androidauthority.com) 38
Most 5G phones offer big batteries owing to the increased power consumption of early 5G modems and connectivity. But just how much more power does a 5G phone need over a 4G device? From a report: Redmi general manager Lu Weibing has taken to Weibo to answer this question, claiming that 5G phones consume ~20% more power than a 4G phone. This suggests that a 20% increase in battery size is needed for a 5G phone to achieve the same endurance as a 4G variant (assuming everything else is equal). The Redmi executive adds that Qualcomm's flagship 800-series processors consume 20% more juice than an upper mid-range Snapdragon 700-series chipset. So when taken together, this means a 5G flagship will consume significantly more power compared to a mid-range 4G phone, which means battery capacity and optimizations are key for high-end 5G phones.
One thing's for sure: (Score:3, Insightful)
First thing I'll do, will be disabling 5G. ... will be *never*.
And treat it like wifi: Only enable it when I need it.
Which, since wifi already exists, and "4G" is fast enough and has a much better range,
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I wish I could to that to those uslessly high-res screens. Just disable 3 of every 4 pixels to save 3/4 of the energy (when designed properly). Who the hell needs 2.5K on a standard size smartphone? Especially with a pointer the size of a hoof.
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Oh, I won't. (Score:1)
After a few years, there won't be much of a choice though.
Just like the time between the Nokia N900/950 and the F(x)tec, regarding keyboards.
It's what you get, when you let morons vote. In the voting booth and at the checkout. (Also: In bed.)
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I hope users can rest assured that it can be used for 1 day
What marvellous progress we've made, when an 1100 would last for a good part of a week off a single charge and now a phone vendor has to reassure us that their flagship phone that was fully charged at breakfast will still be running by dinner time.
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Good for you that you live in a place without cell congestion. It's a growing problem in urban areas and it's the real problem that 5G helps with.
Here in Canada sub-6 5G is active in several cities now as they focus on 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz first, rather than mmWave. They'll also enable 600MHz 5G which doesn't offer better top speeds but still give better management of congested cells.
Only living in a German city ... (Score:1)
Pretty sure our population density is higher than yours.
Besides, what part of that cannot be done with normal wifi? Which, note, *does* actually penetrate fucking standard German brick walls!
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They could add more 4G towers to handle cell congestion, or WiFi.
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And yet I have found 4G to work well even in dense busy environments while 5G tests so far couldn't even manage to cover a whole stadium without dead spots everywhere.
If the beam forming is that important, perhaps we should ditch the kitchen sink and do 5Gb. Or even consider it an extension to 4G recognizing that it is not a replacement for the older technology in many situations.
Re: One thing's for sure: (Score:1)
Then don't use the shitty frequencies that can't penetrate walls!
0.8-2.4GHz 5G would be fine with me. Likely won't be using more power either, due to not being almost closer to a damn flashlight than a radio. And speeds will be good enough too, as "4G" (actually 3.9G) proves.
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First thing I'll do, will be disabling 5G. ... will be *never*.
And treat it like wifi: Only enable it when I need it.
Which, since wifi already exists, and "4G" is fast enough and has a much better range,
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I wish I could to that to those uslessly high-res screens. Just disable 3 of every 4 pixels to save 3/4 of the energy (when designed properly). Who the hell needs 2.5K on a standard size smartphone? Especially with a pointer the size of a hoof.
I usually only set my phone to wifi when it's plugged in at home.
If I leave home, and actually bring my phone, I turn off wifi as fast as I can.
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THIS!
So, other than eating more power, being hard to adequately cover even the area of a stadium, trashing up the public spectrum, messing up weather forecasting, and granting the ability to use up your entire month's data limit in a second, what does 5G give us again? OH yeah, a higher bill, no doubt.
Howsabout we stick with 4G but deploy more lower powered towers to handle capacity issues?
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Yes please do, leave the fast internet for the rest of us who don't have some irrational fear of ending up with 50% battery at the end of the day instead of 55% Seriously do you even know how much power your radio in your phone uses compared to your screen, or an app that has to wake the CPU?
Of course not. Because this was another ignorant post brought to you by BAReFO0t
More information needed (Score:3)
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The first 5g phones are high end phones with fast processors and therefore use more power. I hope there's more information here than that but if so it's not in the article.
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Obviously typical daily use is what's important to most people but we really have no idea if that's what he is talking about, although the screen remains the biggest drain on the battery
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Re:More information needed (Score:5, Funny)
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It used to be... (Score:2)
The old axiom was Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away. Now, Qualcomm and 5G are just on a spending spree.
Not a problem (Score:2)
20% is not 20% is it (Score:3)
This suggests that a 20% increase in battery size is needed for a 5G phone to achieve the same endurance as a 4G variant (assuming everything else is equal).
Assuming what, exactly? Are they asserting that the 5G phone uses 20% more power when it is not transmitting? What duty cycle are they assuming anyway?
I would be surprised if the average phone was using its transmitter 20% of the time on average. What am I missing?
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What you're missing is bad math. Like really bad. He says the processor and antenna power requirements for 5G are each 20% higher so whoever wrote the article called it 20% higher and called it a day. Never mind whether it's 20% for the same amount of data or for the same amount of broadcast time, or other power requirements, or different drivers, or newer operating systems, or whether the processing power requirement is 20% higher for the same amount of crunching.
Not that anyone uses them, but... (Score:1)
It'll be interesting to see how whatever A-series chip lands in Apple's eventual 5G phones compares to Qualcomm's chips.
Comparing SnapDragon 700 series to 800 series is kind of an oranges-to-oranges thing (no apples).
The answer is Depends (Score:3)
Of course there is a third dimension to cover, so unless you have a Huawei antenna network employing their integrated street light design, you would likely need 16-25 times the antennas for the same coverage. As such, outside of the U.S. it will be great. In the U.S. it will likely consume a lot more battery.
5G also supports lower frequencies. Meaning in the old analog, NME and DECT ranges... and even lower. This will provide much longer range through more types of obstacles. But this simply means that phones will broadcast beacons at higher power for longer distances when there is no coverage. I would expect battery life to be terrible in big sparse countries with bad coverage.
So, for most Europeans, coverage should be pretty good and battery life too. For Russians and Americans... do not expect much
Need a more in-depth answer than that, (Score:2)
Is that connected full time?
What if you are just playing games and not streaming or connecting to 5G other than normal heartbeat?
If you stream a movie in the same resolution, what is the difference in battery consumption?
Take web page browsing for example. 5G will pull it down faster and stop downloading. How does that battery consumption compare to 3G/4G downloading of pages that takes longer?
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Is that connected full time?
What if you are just playing games and not streaming or connecting to 5G other than normal heartbeat?
If you stream a movie in the same resolution, what is the difference in battery consumption?
Take web page browsing for example. 5G will pull it down faster and stop downloading. How does that battery consumption compare to 3G/4G downloading of pages that takes longer?
No what we will have to do is learn to accelerate our talk and facetime and behave more squirrel like on video calls. A digital brain implant will become necessary so that we can communicate at 5g speed just so we can do facetime. Either that or have batteries that contain enough wattage to launch a Saturn 5 rocket. Hell we might even have to go back to ancient technologies like concentrated hydrogen peroxide cells just so we can use our small screen phones at full resolution and communicate in 5g. Ain't th
20% More (Score:2)
Good. That will help keeping my balls warm when I put my phone in my pocket.
What is equal? (Score:2)
So they limited 5G to the same transmission speed as 4G? Limited the CPUs and reduced the phone performance? Ensured that no disk I/O or background tasks were happening? Did they use the same transmission frequency or are we talking 5G at mm wave?
It is generally known that a) 5G modems are currently first generation and it is expected to consume more power because of that, and b) that transmission duration is a fraction of what 4G is and as such power consumption for the modem in the device is actually not
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Similar figures came out when 4G was new, vs 3G. But given a set amount of data, 4G does better than 3G, because it spends less time active due to increased bandwidth. I suspect it will be the same here. As long as the cell standby current is not increased, it shouldn't be a problem in practice.
Stay away from 5G (Score:2)
See Polarization: A Key Difference between Man-made and Natural Electromagnetic Fields, in regard to Biological Activity [nature.com]
"The present study explained how this difference in polarization results in corresponding differences in biological activity between natural and man-made EMFs.
Increased biological activity does not necessarily result in observable biological/health effects, since there are adaptive mechanisms operating at cellular-tissue-organism levels in response to ever occurring changes. However, these
Also, more heat. (Score:2)
I remember reading that from somewhere.
20% larger battery? (Score:2)
By my understanding of the article, this title should read
"How Much More Power Does 5G-enabled Chipset Consume Over a 4G-enabled Chipset? Redmi Has Answer"
The confounding factor here is the phone itself. How much of that +20% relative to a "mid-range 4G" phone is due to the 5G data aspect vs just being a higher-end phone with a higher-end chipset? I'm not sure based on the article what role 5G actually has here. It would be useful to compare energy/MB between 4G and 5G. Venture beat has an interesting comp