A common use case where this is unfortunate is when turning on a laptop containing an integrated modem, running on batteries and connecting to a wireless network. Then the modem will seem like disabled in the nm-applet, but actually consume power since the radio is on/registered on the mobile network.

A workaround is to use a hardware modem killswitch, but some laptops only have combined flight mode switch that disables both wlan and 3G modem, and thus not helping for the use case above (an even worse workaround in that case is to enable and disable mobile broadband... After each boot/sleep).

This is fixed for MM master branch.

Note: in git master, the behaviour is no longer to go into low power mode when disabled, not even at startup. Instead, there's a new method in DBus to control the low-power mode.

Will mark as wontfix. Controlling low-power mode independently is already possible in MM 1.x; and the power-state is no longer tied to the modem state (i.e. a disabled modem can be both in full and low power state).