How 5G Affects Smartphone Battery Life Compared to Wi-Fi

Almost every single time we do a battery test, we get a surprising number of people who ask us to test on 5G instead of Wi-Fi. And you know, while we use Wi-Fi for more controlled testing in our lab, Brony Boy might have a point here. It's a completely valid thing to want tested because mobile data can end up using more battery than Wi-Fi. And there are a bunch of reasons why. Unlike a Wi-Fi router that's usually less than like 50 m away, you won't always be right next to a 5G tower. it can be miles and miles away, meaning your phone has to search further and work harder to actually send and receive data. And then there are other factors like constantly checking for network strength and

switching off from one tower to another one if it's stronger. And the fact that when you're on cellular data, your phone could be using more than one radio at a time. So eventually all this adds up to what we believe to be more battery drain. But the question is, how much more? Let's find out. But before we get to the test, we have this box here with food. This was sent out by Factor, our sponsor for this video, who solves one of the biggest problems with cooking in the fact that you have to do it. Sometimes taking an hour or more out of your day for a single meal that's gone in just a couple of minutes. But with their weekly delivery of fresh, never frozen meals, you don't have to do that

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phone on the right is relying solely on that cellular connection where on the left it could benefit from Wi-Fi where after 2 hours of going on the same call with consistent audio on the other end, there is zero difference between the two. But let's see what happens here in messaging. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with how we do things at FBuff, we calibrate devices as best as we can. So, the displays here are calibrated to the same 200 nits of brightness. For this test, the speakers are completely muted, so that way they're not a variable. And on top of that, these phones have been factory reset with the only apps that are installed being the ones that you're seeing in this test. Also, the phones

have brand new accounts, so like there's no background sync going on. Now, for this test, it's important to note that we're using SMS here with our chatbot. So, it's not RCS or iMessage, and these aren't datari conversations. It's just text. So, we're not sending videos or images, meaning we're not going to be using a whole lot of data. And perhaps for that reason, after 2 hours, there's almost no difference between the two. Just like in the phone call, it's actually a onepoint advantage for the 5G phone, surprisingly. But this is most likely just margin of error. But here in FaceTime, I fully expect things to be different because this one is super data

heavy. Not only does each phone have to download the audio and the video from the other end of the call, but it also has to upload its own audio and video back to the recipient. So both down link and up link are active the entire time where after 2 hours of facetiming we see a major difference. The Wi-Fi phone drops down to 62% while the one on 5G goes all the way down to 46%. So that's a 17 point savings just by having Wi-Fi on during that call. Like absolutely huge. Of course, FaceTime is kind of like a worst case scenario. So to get a better idea of the more light everyday use, we move on to browsing where this task doesn't have a whole lot of data being uploaded other than the phone

requesting a web page with the vast majority of the work being downloading the page assets themselves where this time the difference isn't anywhere near as dramatic as that FaceTime call. However, there still was a meaningful delta where using Wi-Fi saved the iPhone 4 percentage points with it now a full 20 points ahead as we head into the 16-hour standby. Now, because we don't have that many apps installed on these phones, I don't expect there to be too much of a difference since there's going to be very little going on in the background. And even though we're on standby for 16 hours, yeah, very little difference with the phone only on 5G

actually doing one point better, which again could just be a margin of error thing or maybe the extra tax of having that Wi-Fi sensor on, but I'm not so sure about it. Here in Instagram, we're just scrolling through the home feed like you would in real life. While we can't control the content that's being displayed on the feed over the course of two hours, I do expect them to roughly average out and we still have the speakers muted so that way we're not introducing any more variables than we need to. where after 2 hours of scrolling the screen for dopamine, it's about the same result as in the browser test with the iPhone on 5G eating up an extra 3 percentage points compared to

the Wi-Fi one, which means that cellular only iPhone is down to its last 4% while the Wi-Fi version is at a healthy 26%. So, I don't know if the 5G phone is going to be able to make it through this Disney Plus task since both phones are going to be streaming the same movie and this one is one of the more data heavy ones since we're constantly downloading or streaming this high resolution file where just 22 minutes into it, there you go. The 5G only iPhone fully gives out while the Wi-Fi enabled one is still at 25%. So, there you have it. A 25 percentage point advantage for the phone that had Wi-Fi on the entire time compared to the one only on 5G in this specific testing scenario. And that's the key point. This

is one specific testing scenario. And there are a bunch of caveats here. For one, we didn't account for cellular handoff. So, when you're walking or driving across town, you don't actually stay connected to one cell tower the entire time, right? You're going from one cell tower to the next. And that process can be battery intensive. And then the second caveat is the test was only conducted in one location in our lab where changing locations can affect things since you're changing signal strength. So to get a better picture of this, we did a series of video streaming tests on an iPhone 17 on YouTube at 1080p. Where on 5G in our lab, it went for 13 hours and 49 minutes. While running the same exact

test just at my house with slightly weaker reception, we netted nearly 1 hour less battery life at only 12 hours and 51 minutes. Obviously, Wi-Fi versus 5G makes a difference, but as we can see from this data set, even a stronger 5G connection versus a weaker one can also matter. And then finally, the third caveat is how much this whole Wi-Fi versus 5G thing can actually affect you depends on the phone you have as well, where you know, all the tests that we've done so far were done with an iPhone 17 or 17 Pro Max, which uses the latest Snapdragon modem. But what about older phones that are using less efficient modems? We got our iPhone 12 Pro Max out with a fresh battery in it where under

the same conditions with Wi-Fi on, it got 19 hours and 46 minutes. And then that same test on 5G only got 9 hours and 31 minutes. So this is a bigger 108% increase in battery life compared to the smaller 87% that we saw with the iPhone 17, which means Wi-Fi will save you even more battery life if you have an older phone with one of those older modems. But even if you don't, I think the Delta is still pretty massive. Anyways, that is it for me in this video. This obviously took a lot of time to put together. So, thumbs up if you guys enjoyed it. Appreciate the feedback in the comments, especially yours, Brony Boy. And as always, I'll see you in the very next