https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jiec.12630
The majority of data heavy stuff also tends to happen in WiFi environments. So I dont know where this 300x overhead increase is supposed to come from. A typical 3G base station is burning 500W/h no matter what data usage is. So unless you share you wireless cell with less than 5 people this should be magnitudes below a fridge. The wired part of the infrastructure is much more efficient and aggregated in general.
I suppose the biggest culprut are not even the smarthones, but their cloud storage services, which are completely optional and not used to a large extent by the majority of smartphone users.
Most of all ISP profits and subscription costs would also be decisively lower/higher if energy use and therefore cost was supposedly that significant.
The 1GB of data cost is sunk cost, whether it’s accessed by one or a million. On the other hand, if we only had one smartphone in this world, we wouldn’t be storing zettabytes for it to access :)
More suitable numbers were 3.5 kW/h for the phone, and 23.4 kW/h for each connection. So, phone consumption should more accurately be 23.4 + 3.5 + (19.1 * total world storage / total world smartphone) !