Massive Wi-Fi throttling on Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G purchased from Amazon India (September 2021 unit)

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Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G for Rs. 36999 (33999 including HDFC Offer)


TL;DR from this thread

Amazon India sale is delivering units manufactured in India in September 2021 in this sale. This batch seems to have a lot of units that have a very unreliable Wi-Fi. It would connect fine and would stay fine for a while but after a while, it slows down considerably. Turning it off and on again would fix the issue temporarily. Resetting the phone does not fix it. If you have such a unit, you should instantly apply for a replacement or refund. XDA has a thread that has 2-3 other folks who got a unit with the same problem. There is also supposedly a Telegram group but I am not a member. There is also discussions on the official Samsung Community. One such thread.

Important stuff: For replacement, do not apply for it through the order page. It would force you to deal with a tech visit from an outsourced company which delays the process. In my case, the tech guy did not bother visiting me. Called me up on the phone and asked me to reset the phone and go through the entire process again and see if that fixed the issue and ping him later so that he can process a replacement. He ended up closing my complaint without confirming me first. Amazon chat support initiated another tech visit which added another two-day delay. Phone support told me that they cannot help me because of this active request in their system and I should contact them once it is over, and I am not satisfied with the resolution. So, use the phone support option. This seems to be a safe and the fastest way to get a replacement and maybe even a refund if replacement units are also affected by this problem.

One member of the forum has confirmed that the unit he got from an earlier stock does not suffer from this issue. XDA and a few other outlets do confirm that there have been a few isolated cases of this issue affecting the entire S20 series. It is just too hard to tell if this is a hardware based issue or a firmware based one.

I ended up applying for a refund. If you are not sure how to test out wi-fi stability, install an app like WiFiMan which continuously monitor wi-fi connection speed. Or just download a very large file (10GB File) and see if it stays at similar speed levels consistently. On my S10 Lite, it is stable while on Fe, it keeps on changing while placed at the same place at same distance from the wireless router. Upload connection speeds actually drop down to 6mbps regularly. In my opinion, this should not happen when power savings are disabled, screen is on, and the app accessing Wi-Fi modem is in foreground.
 
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yeah i am tempted coz getting a refund on second unit is likely to be simpler. i do like this phone and there is no other option in sight as i am quite happy with samsung pay and oneui based ui.
 
And the guy closed the complaint without waiting for my response. I would have to go through the process yet again. And Amazon has assigned some other company to handle my request. Two days wasted. And next appointment is now on 6th. I think I am going to be stuck with this unit. It's probably not a bad outcome tbh. Better than stuck with a messed up display. Hopefully October update arrives soon and maybe it would fix the excessive Wi-Fi throttling.
 
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No option. Technician can approve replacement or refund. Chat support has been unusually useless.
 
heh. so i found two folks on xda who bought the phone from Amazon this week and are facing this issue. one got lucky with amazon phone support and they are sending him a direct replacement. the other guy in in the same boat as me and is waiting for tech visit.
 
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I got this phone in late August from Amazon. Can confirm that my piece does not have any such issue with wifi. Infact I find the wifi signal to be better on this than my Redmi K20. However I've noticed some heating up with 5g radio enabled but didn't see any issues with the Wifi at all so far.
 
That's good to know. Turns out getting Amazon to call you would have initiated a return request instantly based on comments from the XDA thread. Two people used this method and both got replacements issued. I would now have to try again tomorrow after the tech visit. I assume this guy would also try to close the complaint without visiting me. Not that visiting me is going to help as this issue is very random and is hard to reproduce as the wi-fi basically works fine on a fresh connection with the router. If you are going to just restart the phone or reset it or just reset the wi-fi connection, it would appear as fine.
 
Where you get them to call you back.
This option is available from customer service section along with chat.
 
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