Your mobile operator may be to blame for the fast discharge of the smartphone battery.

Disruptions in communication, slow data transfer rate and fast battery discharge of smartphones are associated with not optimal settings of equipment operators. This conclusion was made by scientists from the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research.
For the study, a special Android application NetPiculet was prepared which was installed on smartphones by about four hundred volunteers. The results of the study are disappointing. Four of the main US mobile operators underestimate the data transfer rate in their networks by up to 50%, and about 100 operators buffer the data in such a way that this leads to frequent retransmissions.

The study itself is published on the university’s website with the speaking name Untold Story of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks .
Many smartphone apps rely on long TCP sessions. For example, push notifications services work on this type of “long-lived” connections. Eleven tested operators limit the duration of TCP sessions to ten minutes instead of the optimal thirty. This leads to constant reconnections from the side of the smartphone and depletes its battery faster.
As a result of the study, some network security problems were identified for some operators that allow attacks using IP Spoofing methods.