Battery Life + Telkom LTE

Setting the phone to Telkom 3G sorts out the problem; no need to switch to MTN 3G roaming - getting about 2 days of battery life on an iPhone 8 Plus.

Obviously they need to fix their LTE issue, and glad it's been raised.
 
Yes this is something that mybb should be investigating.

I have a suspicion that it could be the LTE-A and 4x4 mimo on normal LTE that is draining the battery. The battery gets drained by the cell radio no doubt.

Don't know much about this - more info and /or how is their setup different from other network providers. I'm on Vodacom.
 
If I’m not mistaken the higher frequency bands used for LTE use more power than lower frequency bands. Basically lower frequency has further coverage and thus results in less power required. This can be offset by higher tower densities etc.
 
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If I’m not mistaken the higher frequency bands used for LTE use more power than lower frequency bands. Basically lower frequency has further coverage and thus results in less power required. This can be offset by higher tower densities etc.

I have seen people report this but my tests dismiss these claims.

Telkom use 2300MHz tdd carrier aggregation. 2x2 and 4x4 mimo. Also massive mimo and they have 1800MHz for lte too.

Rain Mobile uses 1800MHz and 2600MHz carrier aggregation. Also 2x2 and 4x4 mimo with massive mimo coming soon.

Since Rain Mobile has no 3G or 2G my s8 was always aggregating band 3 and band 38 but there was no battery drain at all. With Telkom the phone always stays warm.

I really tried to figure out why but I can't seem to get to the bottom of it. Can't get all the info from the s8 service mode.
 
Good thing i only use Telkom in the fixed modems, hope the solution doesn't result in performance reduction
 
Replaced Vodacom SIM with a Telkom Mobile SIM in Pixel 2 XL. Extra battery drain was very noticeable.
 
Heavy standby battery drain on the Galaxy S9+ as well. GSam battery monitor is reporting that the kernel is draining the battery. I first thought the phone was faulty. I factory reset the phone multiple times. When I put the phone on airplane mode or roam on MTN, the battery drain is minimal. Now I'm stuck in a contract with telkom's battery killing network and if I roam on MTN I can't use the (extremely throttled) free 50GB LTE data.

Thanks for highlighting this issue MyBB.
 
I have the same on my Galaxy S8. I forced roaming to MTN and the battery is much better.

Something is not right with Telkom's network

I used to do this before MoNice deals, for a while it wasn't as bad I think the problem is that the signal fluctuates wildly
 
I have seen people report this but my tests dismiss these claims.

Telkom use 2300MHz tdd carrier aggregation. 2x2 and 4x4 mimo. Also massive mimo and they have 1800MHz for lte too.

Rain Mobile uses 1800MHz and 2600MHz carrier aggregation. Also 2x2 and 4x4 mimo with massive mimo coming soon.

Since Rain Mobile has no 3G or 2G my s8 was always aggregating band 3 and band 38 but there was no battery drain at all. With Telkom the phone always stays warm.

I really tried to figure out why but I can't seem to get to the bottom of it. Can't get all the info from the s8 service mode.

It would be interesting to see if the same happens within close proximity to a Telkom tower - it might just be battery drain due to boosted tx power.
 
It would be interesting to see if the same happens within close proximity to a Telkom tower - it might just be battery drain due to boosted tx power.

I doubt. The drain still happens when close to a tower. I live next to one. RSRP of -57dB but still have the battery drain pn my s8. Phone constantly stays hot.
 
I doubt. The drain still happens when close to a tower. I live next to one. RSRP of -57dB but still have the battery drain pn my s8. Phone constantly stays hot.

The heat is probably due to the battery drain increase from the boost on the phones antenna for whatever reason.
 
I thought it was just an issue with my iPhone and using LTE - I haven't used the phone on any other network so had nothing to compare it to. I also set my phone to use 3G just so that I can get some decent battery life - otherwise my phone is dead halfway through the day.

I'm glad it's not just my phone and is actually an issue that is being looked at, thanks for testing this mybb, hoping TM figures out the issue so that I can go back to using LTE again.
 
No way, I got a P20 Pro last week (Which is supposed to have amazing battery life), but it drains like mad, can barely get through half a day. So I actually booked it in for repair assessment to see if it's a faulty battery.

I'm gonna try and get it back and just use 3G until they sort out this issue.
 
Could it be the way Telkom has setup the 2300mhz band? Is it true that it is TDD vs the others who use FDD? Would be interesting to see the difference on a phone that can only connect to 1800mhz.
 
I thought there was something wrong with my Redmi note 4 ,never suspected it might be Telkom LTE draining my battery haha
Will try using 3g instead
 
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Could it be the way Telkom has setup the 2300mhz band? Is it true that it is TDD vs the others who use FDD? Would be interesting to see the difference on a phone that can only connect to 1800mhz.

It was what I was thinking but try running a Rain mobile sim the whole day and then you will see it does not drain at all and they aggregate b3 fdd abd b38 tdd so it should drain more but it doesn't.
 
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