Home > News

Until You Have 5G, Google Stadia May Need Additional Hardware to Run Properly

By Laura Tucker
News Google Stadia 5g Featured

Google made a splash on March 19, 2019, when they announced their new game-streaming system, Stadia, that is expected to go live later this year. Those who have enjoyed early versions of the system, though, have reported that it can be difficult to play the games smoothly with their current home Internet.

Once 5G is finally available for everyone, this won’t be a concern, but since it could be a while until 5G is available in your area, that means it may be that much longer for you to fully enjoy Google Stadia, unless you utilize some additional hardware.

The Future of Gaming

With Apple announcing their own gaming service on March 25, streaming and services for gaming are clearly the wave of the future. And to go along with the future, you’ll need high-speed Internet for Google Stadia, and in 2019 high-speed Internet means 5G, which isn’t available anywhere yet.

Google advertised that gamers would no longer need a console and that they wouldn’t have to buy games on CDs or wait a painfully-long time for a download. With the help of the service and the Internet, as well as a specific Wi-Fi-connected game controller, you’ll have multiple games available to you on your laptop, phone, tablet, and even Google Chromebook.

But those games will need 5G Internet speeds to play fluidly and uninterrupted. Those who were privileged to try an early beta version of Stadia reported that the games lagged on currently-available Internet speeds.

Stadia head Phil Harrison discussed this with GameSpot. “There’s a crucial bit in the middle which is helping players optimize [in case] there are some environmental reasons inside their home that are restricting their experience,” he said.

News Google Stadia 5g Laptop

“[We] will give them a knowledge base that will allow them to then – in some cases – move their wireless router or [maybe] upgrade their router.”

He didn’t go into exactly what would be needed to “optimize Stadia,” but Google could be using this to push the sales of their own hardware, such as mesh-capable wireless routers. A group of these could boost your WiFi inside your home.

The Senior Director of Innovation and Trends at the Consumer Technology Association, Ben Arnold, told Inverse that wireless mesh networks could solve the Internet speed problem with Google Stadia.

“One thing that we’re seeing in people’s homes are updates of routers, things like the EERO and Google’s mesh home networks,”said Arnold. “In the near term [as 5G begins to hit consumers] the market around mesh routers is really boosting broadband speeds at home, which benefits cloud gaming.”

Not Ready for the Future Just Yet

It’s not expected that 5G will be available across the United States until sometime next year, and for some other areas across the globe, it could be even longer. But the mesh home networks could help gamers reach the 20 to 25 megabits per second speed needed for Stadia.

This means that perhaps technology companies are putting the cart before the horse in giving consumers great products they’ve been waiting for, before other necessary technology is available. But they’re competing against each other so can’t wait for all technology to be aligned.

Does this make you sour on the Google Stadia news? Or do you plan to do whatever you need to do, even add more hardware, in order to participate in game streaming? Let us know how you think in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.