Video: 10 reasons why Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus is the best phone for the enterprise
Samsung[1] claimed that its Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus[2] are the fastest smartphones on the planet. Samsung's right. They are the fastest.
Statistics from Ookla[3], the company behind the internet performance site Speedtest[4], found the Galaxy S9 smartphone's family has download speeds that are up to 42 percent faster than the closest competitor's newest devices.
Read also: Samsung Galaxy S9 review: Not perfect, but still a stellar phone[5]
That's a big claim. Samsung backs it with Ookla Speedtest Intelligence data from February 2018 to April 2018. This compared the most popular smartphones' download speeds on the major nationwide 4G LTE networks. And, by this count, the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus' download speeds are 37 percent faster than the Apple iPhone X, 17 percent faster than the Google Pixel 2, and 38 percent faster than the Samsung Galaxy S7.
In my own informal tests, comparing my Pixel 2 with a friend's Galaxy S9 on Speedtest over the Asheville, N.C.-area Verizon network, I found the Galaxy S9 came in with 12-percent higher download scores. The speed increase is real.
What powers this speed increase is Samsung's Cat.18 LTE modem, a chip that launched in 2017. It's part of the ARM-based Exynos 9 Series (8895) system-on-a-chip family. It gets it speed from industry-first 6CA (carrier aggregation)[6] support.
With 6CA, the Cat.18 modem can aggregate up to six Component Carriers. This -- combined with 4x4 multiple input, multiple output (MIMO)[7], and 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) -- means, with the right network and conditions, a Galaxy