Does keeping cellular data on at all times cause significant battery drain?

[klear6]

Under developer options is the option to always keep cellular data on for faster network switching and I have aggressive switching enabled because my wifi is really weak at times and my data plan is pretty big. How much extra battery drain would it cause to leave data connected all the time? And does the activity of switching back and forth between network and wifi have a negative impact on performance?

 

[Tim1954]

The network battery drain would depend on how strong your signal is. If you live next to a tower your phone will use minimum power, however, if the signal is weak or marginal, the device will use full power to transmit and will constantly be looking for other towers. This can drain your battery in half a day in marginal areas. This is one reason why it's difficult to compare battery performance if devices.
Your set up may use a little more battery, but I wouldn't think it would be a huge amount... If you have plenty of data, you could just use the network for a day and see if there's any difference in battery life.