My In-Depth Investigation into the Pixel 7a's "Mobile Network" Idle Drain Bug

Hey everyone,

I've been trying to get to the bottom of some frustrating battery drain on my new Pixel 7a and wanted to share my detailed test results to see if others are in the same boat.

The Problem: My phone is losing about 1% battery per hour when completely idle (e.g., 8-10% overnight). When I check the battery stats, "Mobile network" is always the top consumer, even when the phone isn't doing anything.

My Troubleshooting & Findings: I've spent the last few days running tests on a clean device to isolate the problem. Here’s what I found:

• Factory Reset: I did a full factory reset and installed NO third-party apps. The drain still happened.
• The "SIM Off" Test: This is the crazy part. I turned off my eSIM and Wi-Fi completely. The phone continued to drain at ~1% per hour, and the battery stats still blamed "Mobile network" for 80%+ of the usage.
• The Airplane Mode Test: I then tried enabling Airplane Mode overnight. The drain completely stopped, and I only lost about 3-4% over 8 hours, which is normal.

My Conclusion: This pretty much confirms a firmware bug where the cellular modem is not entering its deep sleep state correctly. It's not a misbehaving app, and it happens even when there's no active SIM. The modem is just "stuck on."

Things I've Tried That Didn't Fix It:

• Locking the network to LTE only.
• Deleting and re-downloading a fresh eSIM profile from my carrier.

The only thing that reliably stops the drain is turning on Airplane Mode. I've already sent a detailed bug report to Google with logs.

My Questions for the Community:

1. Is anyone else experiencing this specific type of idle drain?
2. Have any of the recent monthly updates (like the October patch) made this better or worse for you?
3. Are there any other workarounds or solutions I might have missed?

Thanks for reading! Hopefully, this can be fixed in a future update.