Sprint, the fourth largest mobile carrier in the United States, has released a new firmware update for the Galaxy S8. The purpose of this update appears to be boosting download speeds on the handset. According to reports, download speeds on the Galaxy S8 have been boosted by at least 20 percent.
The improvement has been made possible with a bug fix. The Galaxy S8 apparently had a bug in the Snapdragon 835 processor's radio code which caused the handset to jump off of the carrier's Band 41 LTE network sooner than it should have. Since the handset was jumping off of the faster band, it was reverting to the slower bands 25 and 26.
“There was a miscalculation in the software that was reading the device, so it tuned away from Band 41 before it should,” said Ryan Sullivan, vice president of product engineering and development at Sprint.
Sullivan says that this update has been released for both Sprint-branded and unlocked Galaxy S8 handsets in the United States. Average LTE download speeds following the update have jumped by almost 20 percent, from 21.9Mbps to 26.4Mbps.
Customers who are using their unlocked and off-contract Galaxy S8 handsets on Sprint will notice the improvement as well. He mentions that 85 percent of Galaxy S8 owners on Sprint have already received this update.
