As cloud gaming continues to expand, there are still some choke points to the service when it comes to regional availability. While virtually every service is supported in the United States, the remoteness of the Hawaiian Islands presents a challenge. Google Stadia isn’t officially supported in Hawaii for that region, but based on the results of a recent test, it seems to work just fine.
It was made clear a few months before the launch of Google Stadia that, despite the platform being ready to go from day one in the United States, the State of Hawaii would not be officially supported. At the time, Google implied that the reason for this was the location of the company’s data centers, which are not present on the island and, instead, are in the Continental US. Generally speaking, Stadia experiences tend to be better the closer you are to a data center.
Friend of the site Bryant Chappel recently took a trip to Hawaii, and being a Stadia player, he gave the service a shot in the technically unsupported area. In a video on his YouTube channel, The Nerf Report, he documented his finding that, well, Google Stadia seems to work just fine in Hawaii.
Chappel tested out Stadia on a hotel’s WiFi (apparently around 50mbps speeds) using a custom network created by a Netgear device. From there, he was able to get Stadia running on both a laptop and a Chromecast Ultra, even using the WiFi-connected Stadia Controller to play. He reports that, on the Chromecast, there was occasional choppiness to the stream. He further said that his laptop connected directly to the hotel’s WiFi worked even better, saying the responsiveness was close to what he experienced at home in Texas, though Stadia kept putting up the “your connection isn’t stable” message on a regular basis, but it wasn’t mentioned that the stream ever crashed.
As for mobile gameplay, the stream apparently worked fine on WiFi but hurt on cellular data within the hotel with plenty of stream issues. On the streets of Hawaii and even on the beach, though, the results were much better.
Chappel isn’t alone, either. It was reported as far back as December 2019, just a month after the platform’s launch, that Stadia would run well in Hawaii. Your results may vary, though. Google doesn’t mark Hawaii as unsupported for no reason.
These results certainly are surprising given Stadia doesn’t support Hawaii as a region and that the data centers streaming the games are about as far away as you can get. Your results certainly may vary, but it’s certainly a bit of a testament to how well Google’s streaming tech really does work.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments