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2G (original GSM) was deliberately designed to be very power-efficient only for low-data
rate voice services. 3G was designed to be more spectrally efficient and to deliver higherrate data services, but at the expense of using more power.
Specifically:
- 2G uses 200kHz channel vs 5MHz for WCDMA (25x more). Power is roughly proportional
to bandwidth
- GSM used a very power-efficient constant envelope modulation scheme (GMSK). 3G uses
CDMA and higher order modulation (up to 16QAM or even 64QAM), which needs much
better linearity and hence the radio draws far more power. 2.5G (GPRS) and 2.75G (EDGE)
use QAM, which deliver more data and are more spectrally efficient (bps/Hz) so they
coverge with 3G somewhat.