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.
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: