Then it's question of Tx power settings, connection interval and how many PDUs are exchanged during each. If you see chip specification and read blog posts about typical power profile of the BLE chip - e.g. here and here and here - you can see that 4mA are not completely unusual. If you want to have it lower then you need to check several things such as what are your typical Tx and Rx power consumption values (and if you can lower them by SW settings or HW redesign) and what is your "sleep" current in between these, if you can run only with certain connection intervals (which might cause some better sleep/Tx-Rx activity ratio) etc.
Then it's question of Tx power settings, connection interval and how many PDUs are exchanged during each. If you see chip specification and read blog posts about typical power profile of the BLE chip - e.g. here and here and here - you can see that 4mA are not completely unusual. If you want to have it lower then you need to check several things such as what are your typical Tx and Rx power consumption values (and if you can lower them by SW settings or HW redesign) and what is your "sleep" current in between these, if you can run only with certain connection intervals (which might cause some better sleep/Tx-Rx activity ratio) etc.
Agreed on all counts. BLE is really only low power due to the nature of the protocol i.e. not requiring a constant RF link, relying instead on very short bursts of data with large time periods between them.
To reduce power usage though requires the device sleeping between those bursts.
