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Samsung Announces First Wi-Fi 6 Phone

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thiggins

Mr. Easy
Staff member
samsung_s10.png
If you're looking for a smartphone to go along with your Wi-Fi 6 router, it looks like you'll be able to get one soon from Samsung.

The company today announced the Galaxy S10, S10 Plus, S10E and S10 5G. All are powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 that handles 4G radio duties. The 5G model uses a Qualcomm X50 5G modem that handles both both millimeter wave (28GHz and 39GHz) and sub-6GHz 5G bands.

For Wi-Fi 6, however, Samsung decided to use Broadcom's BCM4375 instead of the draft 11ax radio built into the Snapdragon 855.

The S10, S10 Plus, and S10E will be available for preorders tomorrow at 12AM ET (midnight), starting at $900, $1,000, and $750, respectively.

This is much more aggressive push to the U.S. market for Wi-Fi 6 than for Wi-Fi 5 (80211ac). It took about two years between the shipment of draft 11ac routers and 11ac phones in the U.S.

Qualcomm press release
Broadcom press release
 
The BCM4375 is a smartphone Wi-Fi 6 / Bluetooth 5 combo chip. Key features include:
  • Support for 2-streams of Wi-Fi 6
  • Bluetooth 5 including Low-Energy Long Range (LELR)
  • Real Simultaneous Dual-Band (RSDB)
  • 1.43 Gbps Wi-Fi PHY Rate
  • 1024 QAM Modulation
  • OFDMA
  • MU-MIMO
Not bad on paper. I expected a 1201 Mb/s link-rate (2x2 MIMO, 80MHz, 1024 QAM), but we got a 1430 Mb/s link rate. This mean 2x2 MIMO, 160MHz (!) but only 64-QAM.
 
Not bad on paper. I expected a 1201 Mb/s link-rate (2x2 MIMO, 80MHz, 1024 QAM), but we got a 1430 Mb/s link rate. This mean 2x2 MIMO, 160MHz (!) but only 64-QAM.

Samsung claims the following specs for the Wi-Fi in the S10 phones which are supposedly using the BCM4375:

Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax (2.4/5GHz),VHT80 MU-MIMO,1024QAM
Up to 1.2Gbps Download / Up to 1.2Gbps Upload

Who knows what Broadcom used to come up with their 1.429 Gbps PHY rate claim. Possibly some unmentioned non-standard feature enables it. My (complete) guess is that it comes from the Real Simultaneous Dual-Band (RSDB) feature which likely allows the chip to operate a single spatial stream of 802.11ax at 2.4GHz and 5GHz simultaneously.

2.4GHz 1x1:1 802.11ax (HE40,256-QAM) ~ 229 Mbps
5GHz 1x1:1 802.11ax (HE160,1024-QAM) ~ 1200 Mbps

Adding these two PHY rates together gives 1429 Mbps. Few, if any, clients would be able to connect to both bands simultaneously so this speed claim is misleading but that is not uncommon in this industry.

This would require that the BCM4375 support 160 MHz channels which Broadcom has not yet claimed. Samsung is only claiming 80 MHz channels, for now, but that may be because they have not obtained/pursued DFS certification for some S10 devices. The FCC documents that I've looked at for some of the S10 devices make no mention of 160MHz bandwidth even if DFS is supported.
 
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Samsung is only claiming 80 MHz channels, for now, but that may be because they have not obtained/pursued DFS certification for some S10 devices. The FCC documents that I've looked at for some of the S10 devices make no mention of 160MHz bandwidth even if DFS is supported.

Keep in mind that FCC/EU certs are based on all radios in the device - so they might have took the best path to reduce the testing overhead - DFS is always a challenge.
 

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