Best Internet Providers for Gaming in 2024

Latency, or "ping," measures how long it takes your device and the server to communicate over the internet. High latency means more time. So it can lead to lagging and throw off your timing, contributing to losses or, at the very least, sucking some of the joy out of a game. For the best gaming experience, you want the lowest possible latency.

According to the most recent speed test data from Ookla, Verizon boasts the lowest latency of any major ISP, at 16 milliseconds. Anything below 40ms should make for fairly seamless, lag-free gameplay, so lagging should be less of a factor, if it's one at all, when gaming on Verizon Fios home internet.

Elite Gamer promises to reduce online gaming lag by automatically finding faster routes to whatever server you're connecting with. The service costs an extra $7 per month -- or nothing if you're already spending $12 monthly to rent the Cox Panoramic Wifi gateway, a combination modem and router.

Elite Gamer works with more than 150 PC games, including popular titles such as Apex Legends, Battlefield 5, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Dead by Daylight, Destiny 2, Diablo 2 Resurrected, The Elder Scrolls Online, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto 5, League of Legends, Minecraft, Overwatch, PUBG, Rocket League, World of Warcraft and more. 

To use the service, download the Elite Gamer app to your PC, log in with a Cox username and password, and then launch a game. The service supports multiple sessions at once, so if you want to game together with a friend or a roommate, they can download the application and play simultaneously with the same jitter and ping reductions. 

One caveat -- if you opt to get Elite Gamer for free by renting the Cox Panoramic Wifi Gateway, then you should know that the Panoramic Wifi Gateway puts out a second, public Wi-Fi network separate from your home's network that people nearby can use as a hotspot. That feature is on by default, which I wasn't happy about in my Cox home internet service review. Fortunately, you can turn that hotspot off by going to cox.com/myprofile and signing in with your Cox credentials.

$13 per month is a pretty fair price here as far as ISPs are concerned. You'll often need to spend $10 or $15 per month to rent equipment from an ISP. And while plenty of providers are now offering upgraded hardware -- things like mesh routers and Wi-Fi 6 routers -- it's rare to find one that offers a bona fide gaming router as an option.

In this case, the XR1000 would cost you $300 if you were to buy it outright, so you could rent one from Astound for over 18 months and still come out ahead. Gaming features with the XR1000 include built-in DumaOS software that helps prioritize live-streaming and cloud gaming traffic, as well as tools that automatically steer you into the highest-performing servers whenever you're playing online.