The GALAXY S5 is the world’s first smartphone to support both 802.11ac and MIMO, making it one of the fastest, most stable smartphones in the market.

Background: Why MIMO?

As of 2014, 75% of common wireless Access Points (APs) support MIMO technology worldwide, with these numbers increasing each year. With more APs that support MIMO, there is more demand for mobile devices that also support MIMO. In addition, when combined with the latest 802.11ac chipset, MIMO technology can provide even more enhanced Wi-Fi performance and reception quality.

Samsung was one of the first to release products that support both 802.11ac chipsets and MIMO, starting with the GALAXY NotePro and the GALAXY TabPro tablet series released earlier this year. Taking this a step further, Samsung puts this technology into much smaller devices now, such as the GALAXY S5.

What is MIMO?

Most smartphones today have only one Wi-Fi antenna to receive transmissions, primarily because of physical space constraints. With MIMO technology, which allows for two Wi-Fi antennas, the GALAXY S5 can receive wireless signals from two separate transmitter antennas and combine them to theoretically double its Wi-Fi speed.

In addition, MIMO technology also increases the range of the wireless signal to include shadow zones. Shadow zones refer to the area where the transmitting signals are reflected along the path and cannot be received by the receiving antenna. This means that with MIMO, the area that the signal covers is up to 1.5 times larger in real life.

How do the antennas communicate with the router? Routers generally have six antennas, while certain low-end models have three. The signals that routers send out all have different patterns. When a MIMO router sends out two signals via two separate antennas, the two different patterns are combined to create one large signal. This makes it easier for the receiving antennas to process. Even when the transmitting antenna sends different signals, since each receiving antenna receives different signals, they can be combined to reduce noise. For example, when you have three transmitting antennas and two receiving antennas, the combined six signals can reduce noise.

Antenna diversity is a technology that transmits or receives a signal through multiple antennas in order to improve data reception quality. Since your GALAXY S5 has two receiver antennas, they will each receive the same signal from the transmitter antenna but with different levels of quality. If a signal from one antenna shows better quality, then antenna diversity will let your device receive signals from that antenna only, or combine the signal’s direction.
With 802.11ac and MIMO, download speeds are doubled, reaching up to 400 Mbps. This is fast enough to download a 1 GB movie in 20 seconds.

(Note that the download speed may vary according to network environment conditions.)

The GALAXY S5’s Wi-Fi technology is also supplemented by a software feature that provides a faster Wi-Fi experience.
Mobile devices run on CPUs, which are also known as APs, or Application Processors. Clock rates, for example 1.5 GHz, refer to the frequency of the CPU. Samsung’s new software changes the speed of the Wi-Fi chip on the GALAXY S5 based on its clock rates, thereby minimizing power consumption while maximizing speed.

In addition, since smartphone antennas send signals through the air, reception varies based on physical obstacles or noise based on air conditions. This technology actively adjusts the size of the signals based on these various factors. This feature allows the GALAXY S5 to have much faster Wi-Fi speeds even when using the same Wi-Fi chipset as other devices.