new iPhone 5 battery didn't last?

[Hankmac]

Got a new iPhone 5 64Gb in Feb..
Works fine.
On Friday used GPS to drive from Green Valley Az to Farmington NM.
Route was 565 miles taking 9.5 hrs and guidance was very good and had over 20% battery left since I didn't see the warning. A very straight route, mostly Interstate.
On return trip Monday we took a shorter scenic route, 482 miles and still 9.5 hours. About 1.5 hours before end of trip the low battery warning came on and it was totally dead less than an hour later. This route was thru the mountains with tons of curves and switch backs.
Never used the phone or other features. Any ideas on why the battery wouldn't last. It was 100% before leaving on each trip.
Thanks
Hank

 

[russgold]

Well you neglected to mention whether or not you had LTE

But irregardless the highway will have cell phone towers closer to the freeway. The scenic route they were most likely farther away from the road.

Farther from the tower the more battery your phone uses to get back to the tower.

Not to mention freeway cellphone towers are more likely to have been updated with 3G, 4G, or 4G LTE and be faster therefore your phone could communicate less with the cell phone tower since it can transmit a larger amount of data in a shorter period of time.

Freeway cell towers generally have a greater amount of available bandwidth since they are generally more congested as well and the back-end it could be put in when the freeway was built. Fiber optics or whatever

Rural routes the don't always want to spend tons of money when not necessary just basic enough to get you on the web and might still be using copper wire or even high latency satellites for communication.

 

[Hankmac]

russ
Thanks for the answer, it makes sense. I did forget to mention that I'm on TMobile and LTE was enabled.
Hank