Battery life is one of those things that’s a struggle for almost everyone, especially if you’re rocking a compact phone like me. My S26’s modest 4300mAh battery is barely enough to last a day, so I’m always looking for ways to maximize it.
Recently, I made a switch from 5G to 4G, and it improved the overall battery life by 10%. The best part is that switching to 4G didn’t feel like a downgrade, which made the switch all the more fun.
5G is great, but it can also be a battery hog
The battery drain is not worth it
5G is exciting technology and there’s no denying that it can be really fast. But the thing about 5G is that it can also be a battery drain at times. I say “at times” here because it depends on several things, like your phone’s chip, where you are, and your carrier.
A lot of it comes down to how 5G works. LTE runs on lower frequency bands that can travel long distances and even pass through walls easily. While 5G does give you those magical speeds, it leans heavily on mmWave and higher-frequency mid-band spectrum. These bands can carry more data, but their range is short.
That means that with LTE, once your phone locks onto a tower, it’s likely to stay locked in for longer without much effort. But with 5G, your phone has to work slightly extra when the tower is close enough to get the signal, but not enough to get a stable one. This obviously gets even worse when you’re in remote places where 5G signals are few and far between.
This bit largely varies from carrier to carrier, but if the 5G signal is weak, your phone is constantly searching for signals that aren’t there. And all that searching, reconnecting, and switching between bands uses processing power, and more of that means battery drain.
Your phone’s chipset plays a role here too. Some modems are more efficient than others. Ookla, the company behind speedtest.net, did a comparison and found that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon was the most efficient chipset and recorded the least amount of battery drain when using 5G. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 reported the lowest battery drain of all SoCs in Ookla’s analysis, at 31% for 5G users compared to 25% on 4G-LTE. In general, though, you can expect your Android phone to drain 6% to 11% more battery life than usual when using 5G.
4G is still fast enough for most things
It’s not that old
Okay, so 5G causes more battery drain than 4G, but so does gaming, cranking up your brightness, and using features like Always-On Display. That doesn’t mean you just stop doing those things. But the case with 5G is different, because the trade-off isn’t as huge as it seems.
I switched to LTE on my Android and was still getting close to 80Mbps speeds, which is plenty for pretty much everything I actually do on my phone. It’s enough for streaming in 4K, watching Instagram Reels, sending WhatsApp photos, and even downloading decent-sized apps. After a point, I also stopped noticing I was on 4G and not on 5G.
Sure, 5G’s biggest selling point is speed, but speed only matters if you’re actually being held by it. And for everyday phone use, you’re not. Some Android phones also come with a Smart 5G or Smart Data Mode setting that handles this automatically. It lets your phone switch between 5G and LTE, depending on what you’re doing. So if it knows your phone might benefit from the faster speeds, like a download, it switches to 5G temporarily and uses 4G for everything else.
It’s also easy to make the switch. Head to Settings > Connections > Mobile networks > Network mode and choose LTE preferred. That’s all you need to do. In my case, this reduced the battery drain by around 10%, which is not game-changing, but I’ll definitely take it.
I still use 5G, but sparingly
It’s no longer the default choice
All of this, of course, doesn’t mean 5G is a bad idea. That would be a little dramatic. For me, though, I just stopped treating it as my default and started using it only when it’s actually needed.
If I’m downloading a large file, updating apps, uploading photos to the cloud, playing an online multiplayer game, or using my phone as a hotspot, I’ll switch to 5G for the time being. In those situations, 5G isn’t overkill, and it’s definitely worth ignoring the battery use. But the rest of the time, when my phone isn’t doing anything, I stick to 4G and it’s reliable enough.
Of course, battery life isn’t all about what network you pick. But yes, switching to 4G is one of those tweaks that improved my phone’s battery performance without any compromises.