If Stadia works only in private homes with sterling Wi-Fi connections, that means you're probably playing it at home most of the time. But if you can't play games anywhere that has dodgy Wi-Fi, a lot of hotels are out, too, not to mention a lot of coffee shops, libraries, bars and other public spaces. You can't play games on an airplane, fine. I didn't really expect it to, but I had to try it empirically before I wrote off the idea completely.īut the bigger issue comes back to Stadia's overall utility. The immediate lesson here is simple: Don't waste your money on airline Wi-Fi if your intent is to play Stadia games. I'd be surprised if airline Wi-Fi could distribute 4.5 GB per hour to all of its passengers, let alone a single one. After about half an hour of rebooting, reconnecting and restarting, I finally conceded that Stadia was simply not meant for this kind of stress test.Īnd who could blame it? Don't forget: Even at its lowest settings, Stadia consumes about 4.5 GB of data per hour. I had similar results for Gylt, Mortal Kombat 11 and Kine.

I paused to look at the in-game map, and that's when the Stadia app froze up. The game lagged and the camera took forever to catch up with the heroine, but Stadia was, technically, working 30,000 feet from the ground. Besides, if it did work, it'd be too incredible of a find to keep to myself.įor about a minute, I moved Lara through an isolated Mexican village in all of its pixelated glory. But when I examined all the factors independently, it didn't seem impossible either.

And I wasn't at all sure it was going to work. I didn't expect excellent performance while playing Stadia on a plane. Besides, I knew that I'd be taking a Southwest flight, and that company's bandwidth is rated at 11 Mbps, which technically exceeds Stadia's minimum 10-Mbps requirement. But I reasoned that Stadia is new enough that it won't trip any content filters. And most airlines restrict bandwidth hogs, such as Netflix and Amazon Video. Sometimes, it can be a struggle to send an email, let alone stream a whole game. Granted, airplane Wi-Fi is not exactly renowned for its speed or consistency. And these days, most flights offer Wi-Fi with respectable bandwidth and moderate pricing. You're probably in the middle of a game you left at home and would prefer to keep playing it. A commercial flight is a setting in which you need a distraction for a long period of time. In a way, an airplane is the perfect test bed.

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