http://www.intomobile.com/2012/11/30/shocking-phone-calls-over-4g-lte-drain-battery-life-twice-fast/
Prepare to be surprised. Metrico Wireless (now acquired by Spirent, a mobile device performance analytics firm) performed battery tests on voice over LTE, or VoLTE, and found that VoLTE pretty much eats battery life for breakfast. You wonder why some of us still are less than enthusiastic about LTE.
Average power consumption for a 10-minute phone call over CDMA measured out to 680 milliwatts. Meanwhile, average power consumption for a phone call using VoLTE with the same duration was 1,358 mW. That’s almost exactly double the battery drainage. This means there’s a very long way to go before LTE is optimized for phone calls.
“The disadvantage in battery life of VoLTE compared to circuit-switched voice is driven by a few different factors,” Spirent Global Director of Insights Amit Malhotra said in an email to GigaOM. “One is the more strenuous exercise of the device, including conversion of voice to packet data, transmission and receipt over the data network, and reconversion back to voice. Another is the use of less power-efficient components such as data modems versus voice transceivers.”
MetroPCS is currently the only carrier in the United States with a functional VoLTE service and smartphone available with support for the technology. Since other carriers are actively trying to ditch their GSM and CDMA technologies in favor of LTE, it won’t be too much of a shock to hear of VoLTE rollouts in the future. In a perfect world, the carriers will wait until VoLTE has been optimized for power efficiency before placing any bets on it.
Malhotra is optimistic about that possibility, adding that the ”issues will be mitigated over time, especially as components continue to become more power efficient, and devices do not need to switch between different modes of voice call processing.”
Shocking: Phone calls over LTE drain battery life twice as fast originally appeared on IntoMobile.com on 2012-11-30T21:43:02Z. FV1gMYsz9b5j
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