Wifi always on better than 3G always on?

[Guest sensory]

Hi all,

I've tried searching about this and found people raving about keeping their wifi on all day when in range of their router, e.g. at home. They said it was more battery efficient than running on 3G all day to get e-mail updates, etc. and some even said they put the wifi sleep policy to "never" and it was still more efficient than using 3G. Well, I had a hard time believing this so I tried it and after 8hrs of being unplugged I'm down to 15% of my battery. Normally I'll leave 3G on all day even when I'm at home and I get a full day's worth out of my battery and charge at night while I sleep.

So, which is it? What do you guys do when you're in range of your wifi? And if you do keep wifi on all day + your sleep policy set to "never" why am I getting such lousy battery life doing the same?

Screenshots of my battery usage:

http://i.imgur.com/t9ne3.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4cxsi.jpg

[Guest Andyroid]

So, which is it? What do you guys do when you're in range of your wifi? And if you do keep wifi on all day + your sleep policy set to "never" why am I getting such lousy battery life doing the same?

Always on when in range of my WiFi.

As to sleep policy, it is set to never...but, i use juice defender ultimate to manage my WiFi and it runs its own sleep policy dependent on how iits setup

JDU uses my home WiFi over 3G when in range, and it puts it to sleep according to my personal settings.

Without JDU I get about day out of it, running JDU vastly increases it. On charge now after 63 hrs up time since last charge.

[Guest dnaumov]

The answer to your quesion is: it depends. If you are stationary and in range of only 1 3G base station with a good signal, you phone will mostly stay on it and there won't be much noticable difference between Wifi On and 3G Data on (although Wifi On will still win on battery life, just not by much). However, if you are in a populated area with multiple 3G base stations and your phone keeps switching from 1 to another, 3G Data will drain your battery life a lot quicker. Ditto for constantly being on the move. The most optimal solution is disabling/enabling everything purely on-demand via something like Widgetsoid with one of the largest differences in battery life being made by the difference of "GSM Only" mode vs "GSM/UMTS" mode (ie if you aren't using mobile data, you might as well keep your phone locked to "GSM Only").

I went from 1.5 days of user using stock 2.1 with default settings to ~4 days of use when using 2.2 FLB ROM and disabling/enabling features on-demand.

[Guest Dan Diplo]

I've disabled 3G data (as I'm on PAYG and not got any data package) and so have wi-fi permanently on (apart from at night), and can easily get a couple of days using FLB-Froyo G2 ROM. It doesn't seem to particularly drain the battery by itself. The main things that seem to drain battery (for me) are games - Angry Birds etc.

[Guest Phoenix Silver]

for me wifi is always on except on the road

at hotels i connect blade with wifi too

because wifi is a lot faster than 3g (i have an unlimited 3g plan)

at home phone is connected with wifi at 54 mbits (i don't know if blade can do mode n) madwifi drivers of the wifi card of the pc can only run in mode g (54 megbits)

youtube and tv streams run like a charm :D

[Guest sensory]

Day two and I'm having different results than everyone else. 3G has always been quite good to my battery but now only having WIFI connected and keeping my phone in a stationary position, I'm at around 50% of battery left after 5 and a half hours. According to the battery information, WIFI is at 45% of total battery consumption.

[Guest Rotmann]

Wi-fi eats for me around 6% battery every hour when connected, 2G/3G 1-2%. 2 IMAP Mail accounts, messenger, weather, news sync always on.