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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I received my S20 FE 5G today. I had purchased it from samsung.com(savex technologies). It's was manufactured in sept 2021 and came with sept 2021 update preinstalled.


After setting it up, When I performed a iperf3 test against a server on a PC in my local network, I was also only getting 29.8-35mbps speed which worried me a bit.

I tried reducing battery temperature which felt like it was doing something(speeds increased to 50mbps), I tried enabling enhanced mode, turning wifi on/off but none of this seemed to have an effect on wifi speeds.

Then, I enabled/disabled flight mode that increased speeds to 60mbps but that is also quite low for this device.


After this, I rebooted the phone once and now it's perfect! I get ~400mbps up/down from the phone regardless of the temperature. I ran the iperf3 test for 30 minutes in the background and in the foreground, I captured 4k videos, ran geekbench CPU Benchmark and the speeds remained consistent at around ~350-400mbps.


There are some other issues like,


1. CA doesn't work on Jio at all. On airtel, It latches on to 4CA in my area. My Poco F1 used to latch on to multiple bands on Jio as well but it just doesn't seem to be working here. I really want to see this fixed in future updates but it's not a huge problem for me right now.

2. Wifi Calling doesn't work in airplane mode. I guess this might be due to airtel/jio's restrictions? but I don't really know.. US Telecom companies allow Wifi calling on Airplane mode.

3. Geek bench scores were 560 in single core and 3.1k in multicore. Single core scores are relatively low for what I should be getting but the phone performs fine and antutu scores are where they should be so this doesn't bother me as much.

4. You can't record vowifi calls. :|

Overall, I love this phone and I think I am going to continue using it. :)
 
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@Samuel I talked to Samsung CS about it 2-3 times and I have gotten mixed responses.

One of them said,

1. If you buy from samsung.com, There is a 7 day period in which you can return/replace the phone.
2. In case of offline stores, There is a 14 day period.


But in both cases, You have to visit the service center(or ship the phone to a service center) and they have to confirm that the phone has a problem.

Another CS said similar thing but they said, There is no return policy. You'll have to ship the phone or go to a service center and they'll replace it. He said I can do this within the 14 day period.


A friend of mine has also bought this phone with me from samsung's shop. He'll open it tomorrow and I'll report back if he has encountered any issues.

So far, like 95% of people I have seen who have complained about this have bought this from Amazon/Appario. In 1 case, Amazon has even shipped a returned phone to someone and they are delaying shipping.
 
Getting a DOA certificate from service center is going to be hard. Especially for an issue like unstable Wi-Fi.
 
That's true.

And anyway, I spoke too soon. Wifi issue is happening again. I am getting ~45mbps down and ~9mbps up speeds maximum and rebooting the phone doesn't fix it anymore. LTE speeds are also terrible because no CA. :/
 
A youtube comment said that this issue started from August update. Another comment on Samsung Community said October update doesn't fix this. It's crazy without an official statement from the company.
 
@Sushubh This is most likely just a software issue.

Someone in a s20 fe telegram group enabled Wifi Verbose logging, Ran logcat while connecting to a wifi and downloaded something and this is what they captured in the process.

Something in the phone's networking stack throttles the speed to 30mbps.


Source
 
@Sushubh In wifiman, You were seeing the theoretical maximum speeds fluctuate. That's different.

In the logs I shared here, Something else applies rate limits on the wifi connection and these are the rate limits you are actually running into.

The phone may say the theoretical maximum speeds are 200mbps but because of this other rate limit, It'll never reach those speeds.
 
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