Battery drain with USB modem

[nick42983]

I have a Macbook Air (Haswell, i7, 8GB). I've spent the past month in Poland and while in my apartment I've been using a USB modem (Huawei) to connect to the Play 3G network in Warsaw. When using the modem my battery life on a full charge drops to about 8 hours, while when I'm in a coffee shop on wifi or just at home without the modem on, it goes back up to 14-15 hours.

Does a USB modem really drain close to 50% more battery? Next time I'll plan to get a wifi modem, since charging my laptop every day gets to be annoying, when I bought it for its battery life.

 

[teffers]

Not sure about USB modems draining the battery (although I'd expect they may well do) but I know the wattage being used on my MBA 2013 just about doubles when I'm using the Thunderbolt GIGABIT connector for internet (mine says about 8-9 hours on a full charge).

The 12 hours + is pretty much perfect scenerio: wifi web browsing so anything other than that is gonna negatively impact the hours.