How to stream Stadia games over 4G and 5G
Game streaming services like Google Stadia help to remove any hardware bottlenecks you might have when gaming on a computer. This is because of the most part, the bulk of the processing is done remotely on a server somewhere, and all you really need to do is stream the content like you would a YouTube or Netflix video.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t any bottlenecks, although in this case, it would be your internet connection. Stadia had previously only worked with a WiFi connection, but the good news is that Google has since announced that as an “experiment”, they will be allowing gamers to enable streaming over 4G and 5G connections.
This is a completely opt-in process and if you’d like to enable it, here’s how.
How to play Stadia games over 4G and 5G
- Launch the Stadia app on your Android phone
- Click your avatar at the top right corner
- Select Experiments
- Choose “Use Mobile Data”
Once enabled, you should now be able to play Stadia games over a 4G or 5G connection. We should warn you that using a mobile connection means that you could eat into your data cap by quite a huge chunk. According to 9to5Google, an APK teardown of the Stadia app revealed that using mobile data could result in gamers consuming as much as 2.7GB per hour.
Compared to streaming Stadia games at 720p which consumes 4.5GB per hour, this suggests that streaming over a cellular connection means that games are being streamed at a lower quality than HD and possibly at lower framerates. It might not be as noticeable on a mobile device with a smaller screen compared to playing on a monitor or TV, but it’s something to take note of anyway.
Source: Google