I have struggled to find any definitive information regarding the 5G settings on iPhone. Should I set 5G to On or Auto?
How much is the battery degradation in On mode? Why wouldn’t I want to be connected to the more reliable 5G network all the time?
In my city, 5g isn’t necessarily more reliable nor is it faster. Oh well.
I have my set for “Auto” so it detects when available. I’m unaware of any tests showing battery degradation of Auto vs On. My hunch is that it does not matter to any noticeable measure. I do notice better battery longevity during the day using Low Power mode.
I never tried the setting “5G On”. I leave it to the automatic option so that the operating system can decide whether it does make sense to connect to 5G or not.
I don’t see any sense in always connecting to a 5G network, if other options are more suitable for my needs. And one of my needs is to get the best out of my iPhone. 5G is nice to have, but 4G always is a very decent alternative. Eventually, everything will be 5G. Even with the automatic setting, I am noticing that the iPhone chooses more often to connect to 5G compared to the past. I really can see the progress of the network being upgraded. But until we are at this point, when 5G will be everywhere, it very well might be a good option to let the iPhone decide what is best given power consumption needs and local signal strength. If the iPhone is being forced to always connect to a possibly weak 5G signal, I do not see any benefits. Then again, I do not have any idea if “5G on” means that the iPhone always connects to 5G no matter what.
1 Like
The 5G modem consumes a lot of energy and LTE (4G) is efficient. So in Auto mode the device decides which format to use based on your usage. eg. watching YouTube needs more bandwidth so it will switch to 5G to improve your user experience, but for email in the background it may use LTE. Auto is default and recommended for most users.
Thanks for the replies.
It does all seem a little unclear.
I am agree that 4G is actually a good service so I don’t necessarily agree with the point that if I am watching YouTube then the phone will switch to 5G to improve the experience. If the video is streaming fine on 4G why switch to 5G?
I understand that one of the benefits of 5G is greater user capacity per cell tower. I don’t know the numbers, but let’s say that a 4G tower can support 10,000 users at a time and a 5G could do 100,000. If this is the case, then at an event eg a sports match, the phone network may get overloaded and data won’t stream and calls (over IP) and messages won’t get through. I have experienced this.
I’m 5G auto will the phone automatically switch to 5G at this time, even when the phone is effectively idle, so that messages can get through? I am
Not convinced it does which is why I am considering 5G On.