Your mobile operator may be at fault for quickly discharging a smartphone's battery

Communication interruptions, slow data transfer speeds and the fast discharge of smartphone batteries are related to non-optimal settings of the operators equipment. This is the conclusion reached 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 of about four hundred volunteers. The results of the study are disappointing. Four of the main US cellular operators underestimate data transfer rates in their networks by up to 50%, and about 100 operators buffer the data in such a way that it leads to frequent retransmissions.

The study itself is published on the university's website with the Untold Story of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks .
Many applications for smartphones are counting on long TCP sessions. For example, push notifications services operate 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 smartphone and drains its battery faster.
As a result of the study, some operators have also identified network security problems that allow IP Spoofing attacks.