Does Wi-Fi Calling drain more battery when you are on a phone call?

[SoYoung]

Hi. I have an iPhone 6s plus and my battery was and its still very good. Recently I decided to turn on Wi-Fi calling feature just to test this out for a couple of days. When I dont do any calls, the battery seems to be the same, but today, before I make a call, I was at 90% and after the call (who last 1h38min) the battery was at 71%. Is it normal? Losing 19% of battery life for a 1h38min call seems higher than normal phone calls.

So I want to know if Wi-Fi calling drains more battery when you actually do a phone call, and if you leave this option on all the time? is it a feature meant to be always on? My carrier support VoLTE so is it better to just use cellular network? I live on a house and most of my calls are on a basement with 2 bars reception, normally I have 3-4 bars when I'm upstairs.

Thanks!

 

[C DM]

Generally speaking it shouldn't user more than cellular and given that it usually kicks in when cellular signal isn't great it should use less battery in comparison to using not so great cellular. Perhaps if you have another similar length phone call from the same location you can try disabling wifi calling and seeing what your battery usage would be like just using cellular.

 

[Gav2k]

Hi. I have an iPhone 6s plus and my battery was and its still very good. Recently I decided to turn on Wi-Fi calling feature just to test this out for a couple of days. When I dont do any calls, the battery seems to be the same, but today, before I make a call, I was at 90% and after the call (who last 1h38min) the battery was at 71%. Is it normal? Losing 19% of battery life for a 1h38min call seems higher than normal phone calls.

So I want to know if Wi-Fi calling drains more battery when you actually do a phone call, and if you leave this option on all the time? is it a feature meant to be always on? My carrier support VoLTE so is it better to just use cellular network? I live on a house and most of my calls are on a basement with 2 bars reception, normally I have 3-4 bars when I'm upstairs.

Thanks!

It very much depends on several factors from my own experience.

5ghz wifi calls use more battery that 2.4ghz wifi calls.

If you turn cellular off then wifi calling is on par with cellular calling.