Help Low signal strength -> Battery drain?

[ashvarma]

Perhaps this question is generic for phones, but I do own Incredible S.

I wanted to check the experience of other users on how much low signal strength contributes to battery drain.

Outside my home, at place of work, I have signal strength as 20+ asu (about -70db or better). I feel the phone seems to be lasting much longer.

At home, where I spend 12 hours at least per day, signal strength at best is around 6-7 asu (-100db or lower), and in some rooms even lower. And I feel battery draining quite fast.

With gingerbread, you can click on the battery usage graph and it tells you what kind of activity was active during what time in the past. And I see "Signal" showing as yellow for the period I am at home and green otherwise. And associated with the yellow portion of Signal bar, the battery usage show a much faster drain.

Anyone else can confirm this general observation? It sounds logical to me that with very low signal strength, phone has to put out a stronger signal to maintain a quality voice connection.

 

[tpbklake]

Perhaps this question is generic for phones, but I do own Incredible S.

I wanted to check the experience of other users on how much low signal strength contributes to battery drain.

Outside my home, at place of work, I have signal strength as 20+ asu (about -70db or better). I feel the phone seems to be lasting much longer.

At home, where I spend 12 hours at least per day, signal strength at best is around 6-7 asu (-100db or lower), and in some rooms even lower. And I feel battery draining quite fast.

With gingerbread, you can click on the battery usage graph and it tells you what kind of activity was active during what time in the past. And I see "Signal" showing as yellow for the period I am at home and green otherwise. And associated with the yellow portion of Signal bar, the battery usage show a much faster drain.

Anyone else can confirm this general observation? It sounds logical to me that with very low signal strength, phone has to put out a stronger signal to maintain a quality voice connection.

Yes I would also agree with your observation. At home and at work I have strong signals and also WiFi access and I can get about 2 days of use on a single charge.

When we went on vacation this summer to the Florida gulf coast near Tampa, I had coverage, but only about 2 bars and the signal was always around -120db without any Wifi and I couldn't last a full day on a single charge. By dinner time I had to plug the charger in.

 

[ticho]

It makes sense - with bad signal, there is some data loss on the line, and both ends have to send some stuff several times before it gets through. That applies even if you are not making any call or data transfer - phones exchange small amounts of data with their cell towers all the time.

 

[MisterBill]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I have the same problem, except it's happening at work and the phone will often be in no service mode. Is there any way short of going into airplane mode to stop the phone from killing the battery when it has a poor signal? Is there a setting to tell it to stop trying so hard to find a signal? It's a pain to have a dead battery by the end of the workday.