Strange battery drain issue

Im on o2. So today for no reason (no app updates or anything recently) I noticed that my battery was dying quicker than normal when on 4G but doesn't die as quick on wifi. When I wasn't using the phone the battery life was as expected so wasn't a wakelock. It was only when using the phone and using data that the battery % went down a lot quicker than normal. A thought came to me that maybe the mast is having issues and draining more battery? Anyway I asked a few people where I work also on o2 and they noticed more battery drain today than usual. Interestingly there was also work on the mast where we both work yesterday.

So is it possible that the mast is faulty or having issues, and draining the battery more than normal? Signal is fine and doesn't drop but its odd that 5 of us have all noticed this today

similar post on o2 community https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Android-Devices-Samsun...

I would have thought if the phone as good signal then the drain would have been handset only?

Well reading a few forums it seems many people all over the country on different networks had battery drain for no reason yesterday, and today its all fixed. Very odd issue

I believe that to save battery life and reduce your brains exposure to RF radiation, the handset transmits with the minimum power possible to reach the base station. If that is transmitting on reduced power then the handset will increase it's own power as the base station appears futher away. Would be interesting to see measurements of the change in battery usage between a phone 50m from a mast and say 1500m from that mast.

In reply to a post by bobble_bob:

Well reading a few forums it seems many people all over the country on different networks had battery drain for no reason yesterday, and today its all fixed. Very odd issue

Maybe it was a mass handset contents harvest?

I suspect it was a server side app update that went wrong as it appeared to only effect Android users

Edited by bobble_bob (Thu 12-Jan-17 16:23:16)

I experienced this today on an LG Nexus 5X on the EE network. In 2 hours it went from 100% to ~30% battery with wifi and location services disabled and having made only one 10 minute call.

Be interesting to see if it happens again tomorrow as the phone has received no ~visible~ updates the last few days that could have caused it. Of course, the carrier can push invisible service updates out that just get processed unbeknownst to the user.

http://lifehacker.com/facebook-and-messenger-server-...