The latter is one of the greatest causes of battery drain apart from actual data transfer. In the active state, bluetooth keeps looking for devices to connect to and broadcasts a bluetooth signal to allow other devices to discover it. Passive: Bluetooth > 4G (LTE) > 3G and 2G > WiFi This question's answer depends on the state of the particular connection you are talking about, as in Active, Passive and Off.Īctive means that data transfer is occurring, Passive means that the radio is switched on, Off means the radio is off.Īctive: Bluetooth > 4G (LTE) > WiFi > 3G and 2G So the battery gets more of a hammering on WiFi - but not because it's less power efficient, simply because the phone in general is doing more work (screen on, processor working hard, etc.). Therefore they don't use data as much on cellular as they do when they are connected to WiFi. Hence, pulling data on a 3G or 4G network will typically use more power than on WiFi (for the same amount of use).Īs Marty Larsson has highlighted, though, many people have limited cellular data limits but much higher or unlimited WiFi quotas. 3G and 4G tend to have to work off lower signal level levels than WiFi and therefore tend to use slightly more power than WiFi when in use.

So there will always be two radios on when you have 3G, 4G or WiFi data switched on as all three will use a separate radio to voice/texts. I'm not an engineer but I know that 2 radios consume more resources than 1.The GSM radio for voice, texts and 2G data (it's a single radio) is always on, regardless of whether you're running on wifi or cellular data. WiFi is for data only, which means you're still using cellular for voice and texts. You're saying cellular connections drain batteries faster than WiFi? That makes no sense.

Power consumption wifi vs bluetooth