I’m the last guy to know the facts about the story and you worked on them yourself so I will defer.
“The wireless infrastructure landscape in the US showed 142,100 cell towers and 452,200 outdoor small cell nodes across the country at the end of 2022.”
327 million cell phones in use in the US.
Charging a phone once a day will use about 0.15 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month and 1.83 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.
So maybe my friend wasn’t onto a significant power drain source?
It’s the cell sites that consume the power. And they say the switch from 4G to 5G will require about twice as much power for the 5 G sites. “According to Huawei data on RRU/BBU needs per site, the typical 5G site has power needs of over 11.5 kilowatts, up nearly 70% from a base station deploying a mix of 2G, 3G and 4G radios.”