If your Pixel 11 is burning through battery overnight even when you’re not touching it, your Wi-Fi router might be the reason, not the phone. Android Authority’s Hillary Keverenge traced unusually high idle drain on some Pixel 11 units to specific routers repeatedly waking the phone from sleep.
The pattern showed up as idle battery drain of roughly 2.5 to 3% per hour while connected to a home Wi-Fi network — the kind of number that adds up to a dead phone by morning. Testing found the phone’s Wi-Fi radio was being woken about 135 times per minute on a Tenda Wi-Fi 6 mesh system, compared to a small handful of wakeups per minute on other routers. TP-Link Omada and Fritz!Box hardware showed similar problems, while other Wi-Fi 6 routers from Huawei and Asus, plus newer Wi-Fi 7 setups, ran normally.
That split points to a compatibility issue between the Pixel 11’s radio and specific router firmware or chipsets, not a flaw in the Wi-Fi 6 standard itself, and not something confirmed to affect every Pixel 11 owner.
How to Check if This Is Happening to You
- Open Settings > Battery > Battery usage and check what percentage Wi-Fi or “Mobile network standby” is consuming while the phone is idle overnight.
- If Wi-Fi usage looks unusually high relative to screen-on time, note your router’s brand and whether it’s running in Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) mode.
- Compare battery drain over a few hours connected to your home Wi-Fi versus the same period on mobile data only (Wi-Fi toggled off), to isolate whether the router is the variable.
The Workaround That Worked in Testing
Switching an affected router from Wi-Fi 6 back to Wi-Fi 5 mode dropped the wakeup rate from around 135 per minute to about 2.4, and cut idle battery drain from the 2.5–3% range down to roughly 1% per hour. Most routers let you set this from their admin panel, usually under wireless or radio settings — look for a band mode or protocol option and select 802.11n/ac instead of 802.11ax. This does cost you Wi-Fi 6’s throughput and efficiency gains, so it’s a stopgap rather than a real fix.
No Google statement on this issue has surfaced as of this writing, and the root cause — Pixel firmware or router-side behavior — remains unconfirmed. If downgrading your router’s Wi-Fi standard fixes your drain, that’s a strong sign your setup is affected; if it doesn’t change anything, the cause is likely something else entirely.
Source: Android Authority
