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

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sushubh
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies Replies 122
  • Views Views 27,194
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.
 
Last edited:
@Sushubh Isn't s20 fe 5g a little bit outdated now? Performance is likely okay for your use case but what about software updates?
 
would get android 13. that's good enough for me. i rarely keep phones for more than 2 years. in fact, s10 lite is the first phone that i have kept for more than 1.5 years. i wouldn't have ordered if this was going to be discounted to ~40K. but 34 is a pretty solid price. i really missed not having qi charging and waterproof on s10 lite. i am very happy with s10 lite and how well it still performs today. this is why i am not selling it or exchanging it. would switch dad's Redmi with it.
 
My only gripe about this phone is slower charging compared to the competition and Samsung including a mere 15W charger inside the box.
 
i avoid doing fast charging on s10 lite myself. so this is again not really an issue. would be using qi charging mostly. and probably at low power. 25w is good enough to be honest. 4500mah easily lasts for a day. my s10 lite after 1.5 years still show 22-28 hours of battery life. my pixel 2 required charging 3 times in a day at this stage.

i would still have my s10 lite charger which i believe is 25w. s10 lite was capable of 45w charging somehow. never bothered getting a 45w charger for it. it gets hot enough on super fast charging on the stock charger it came with.

tbh i was surprised to see in rajit's video that it comes with a charger!
 
Got the phone around an hour back. Nothing exciting so far. 120hz is definitely nice to have. This phone does not have MST.
 
Delivery is less than 10 hours. Noice. What else did you buy?
 
sort of disappointing that this phone also has 3 fingerprint limit. s10 lite is same. there is no option to disable both fast & superfast charging. again similar to s10 lite. only settings are to disable fast charging and fast wireless charging. this means that if i am using a 25w charger, i cannot get it to charge at a mid-power setting like the non FE editions.
 
Back