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WMM Power Save Can Improve BlackBerry WiFi/UMA Battery Life? Claim Of 15-40% Longer Battery Life

by Ronen Halevy on Aug 29th, 2008 at 11:37 am EST
9 Comments »
 

A friend of mine who uses T-Mobile UMA asked me why his battery was dying so quickly at home compared to when he was at work using WiFi.I personally do not have a WiFi or UMA BlackBerry so I decided to do a bit of research. At first I thought it was just him imagining things because WiFi is power hungry…

After a bit of digging I ran across a feature that could be the culprit behind his story. Turns out that Cisco enterprise routers have a feature called WMM Power Save that is not supported by many/most household wireless routers. Many routers support WMM which improves multimedia and video over wireless but most companies do not bother setting up WMM Power Save which helps boost battery life since it is not required by the standards committee. The claim by the WiFi Alliance is that WMM Power Save will improve battery life by 15-40% which is obviously a big deal.

Once more I set out to do a bit of digging and it turns out that BlackBerrys are certified to use WMM Power Save. According to this knowledgebase article this is the reason for the battery life discrepancy.

So I am still on the hunt for a consumer wireless router that supports WMM Power Save and so far have not had much luck. Has anybody found a good one?

There is a list available at this link where you can check what certifications your current router has but I have not had the time to go through them. Let me know if you spot any.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 and is filed under News.
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9 Comments to “WMM Power Save Can Improve BlackBerry WiFi/UMA Battery Life? Claim Of 15-40% Longer Battery Life”

  1. Posted by: Zaventh
    August 29, 2008 at 1:25 pm EST

    I was pleased to find that not only did my DIR-625 D-Link router have WMM, it is also enabled by default!

  2. Posted by: Nikolaus
    August 29, 2008 at 2:50 pm EST

    Since T-Mo is the big UMA BlackBerry provider in the US, any word on if the T-Mo routers have this one by default as well? Rogers, Fido, and Orange I think also offer UMA. Sprint has a similar thing too. We need the details here people!!

  3. Posted by: Nikolaus
    August 29, 2008 at 2:56 pm EST

    The Linksys WRTU54G-TM router supplied by T-Mo for HotSpot@Home AND TalkForever Home Service does not seem to be on the list provided, while the D-Link DIR-655 I used to run before I got the T-Mo router is. Damn!!

  4. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    August 29, 2008 at 3:19 pm EST

    I was hoping to put the idea out there to see if we could get some more concrete information. 15-40% longer battery life is no small feat…

  5. Posted by: Nick Cupo
    August 29, 2008 at 5:49 pm EST

    The Linksys WRT54G-TM router that T-Mobile gave me with my Curve has WMM. I guess I’m already getting the battery boost… who knew?

  6. Posted by: the-Jer
    August 29, 2008 at 8:38 pm EST

    The Linksys WRT54G v4 does support WMM. They have it stuffed under QoS which is under “Applications and Gaming”

    Now, if I could only get the Bold here in the states.

  7. Posted by: Justin Dybedahl
    August 30, 2008 at 10:21 am EST

    If your router supports it you can always flash to the DD-WRT firmware. Has WMM capability built in. http://www.dd-wrt.com

  8. Posted by: Kraig S.F.
    September 29, 2008 at 12:34 pm EST

    I have a T-Mobile UMA enabled blackberry, and think there may be another explanation for the battery life issue. Normally I can get 3-4 days of standby time on my blackberry while in UMA mode at home. Occaisionally (like once a month), I will notice the battery drain in 1/2 of a day. When this happens, I notice that the phone is switching back and forth between UMA mode and EDGE mode every few minutes. The up and down arrows indicating that the radio is active are on constantly until the battery runs out.

    I don’t know exactly why this happens but would speculate that my home Internet connection is degrading enough to cause the Blackberry to pop out of UMA mode and then just getting good enough to switch from EDGE mode back to UMA.

  9. Posted by: Jay L.
    February 13, 2009 at 12:59 pm EST

    The AirLink #AR670W does have the WMM technology.