I can typically get 5-6 days of standby time from my cell phone battery when I’m in my home territory (northeast PA), but I’ve noticed that when I travel more than an hour or so away from home, my cell phone battery will go dead in less then a day. Just this weekend, I took the cell phone off of the charger at 9:30am and drove up to Niagara Falls and the phone was dead by 3am or so.
My calling plan is one of those one-rate deals where I can make/receive calls in all of the northeastern states as part of my plan, so everything from OH/MD through the northeast is technically my “home” territory. Why it is that when I’m away from the area code that I reside in, my battery gets sucked dry? Why is keeping a signal available to my phone when I’m out of my area code so much more taxing to my battery than when I’m at home?
Any cell phone experts out there than can explain this phenomenon to me? Anything I can do to prevent this?
The reason for this is that when you roam, you are passing from a digital cell to an analog one.
Nealry all phones these days are capable of operating in both modes (Analog and Digital). Because the analog mode is more prone to interference, etc, the phone must broadcast at higher power when in analog mode to get the same effective range, clarity, and so forth. Higher power = higher battery drain.
If you check the specs on your phone, it probably gives two seperate call and stanbdy durations for analog and digital mode.
So the battery drain has nothing to do with leaving your home area other than the fact that the other cells you enter are analog instead of digital. If you roamed to another digital cell, even outside of your home calling area, your battery life would be unaffected.
Most phones give an indication if they are in digital mode or analog mode so you could put racekarl to the test. You kind of have to keep track of this if you want a good test. Because you may have digital coverage at Niagara Falls but the battery will get sucked dry as you are driving with analog coverage.
Phones have to wake up every so often to listen to the system. How often they do is a network programmable setting for some phone technology (probably all but I am not sure). So different areas can have very different standby times because of this. Probably not quite as big as you are seeing but perhaps 2 or three times different.