Slashdot: Verizon Support Recommends Turning Off 5G to Conserve Battery Life

Verizon Support Recommends Turning Off 5G to Conserve Battery Life
Published on March 01, 2021 at 10:04AM
"Are you noticing your battery life is draining faster than normal?" tweeted Verizon Wireless customer support on Sunday, the Verge reports: Despite its relentless promotion of 5G phones and the fact that it spent more than $45 billion bidding on a new faster spectrum, Verizon support now is advising people on Twitter to turn off their phones' 5G access to preserve battery life. In a Sunday morning tweet, Verizon support helpfully suggested that "one way to help conserve battery life is to turn on LTE" if users found their batteries were "draining faster than normal." That step would, of course, turn off 5G in a phone that has it available. It's also worth pointing out that you don't actually "turn on LTE" when doing this step — LTE is always enabled as a fallback for the 5G network. But Verizon is obviously being cautious so as not to actually tell its customers to "turn off 5G". Verizon's tweet is now "unavailable," having apparently been since deleted. The Verge also points out that Verizon's nationwide 5G network "uses a technology called DSS, which in many instances is actually slower than the LTE network it's trying to replace."

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