LTE battery life

In the grand scheme of things LTE is at its infancy, but it is interesting to look at how battery life will be impacted by LTE. Information sources on the subject are rare, but I did come across the following figures on the Samsung website for the Galaxy SII LTE.

As you can see LTE talk time is not mentioned as the current voice solution of LTE is fallback to 3G or 2G. More on this subject can be found on a previous post here.

LTE standby time is mentioned and as you can see it is worse than 2G and 3G by a considerable margin. The actual figures are pretty irrelevant as manufacturers measure these assuming the largest idle mode DRX cycle possible which you will never find in a real network.

The relative difference however, almost 30% reduction in battery life, indicates that the idle mode tasks (listening to the paging channel, measure serving cell and neighbour cells, etc) of the LTE part of the baseband and RF chain require a lot more power that the 2G/3G ones. I expect this will improve over time, but at least in the near term early adopters of LTE smartphones/tablets should have a charger handy.

The full specifications of the Samsung Galaxy SII LTE, including the extract above can be found here.