Best Internet Providers for Gaming in 2023

Verizon Fios speed tiers -- 300Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps and, in some places, 2Gbps -- all offer plenty of upload and download speed for online gaming. The provider also excels at another important gaming factor: latency. 

Latency, or "ping," is a measure of 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 totally 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 15 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.

As a bonus, Verizon Fios is now offering a free MOCA Ethernet adapter for networking and a $50 Xbox e-gift card to new gigabit customers. 

Cox is one of the largest cable internet providers in the country, and it's one of the only ones that offers a feature dedicated to online PC gaming (Mac and gaming consoles aren't supported, unfortunately). 

Elite Gamer promises to reduce lag when gaming online by automatically finding faster routes to whatever server you're connecting with. The service costs an extra $7 per month -- or nothing at all if you're already spending $12 per month 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, you'll need to 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 at the same time as you with the same reductions in jitter and ping. 

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 is something I wasn't crazy about in my review of Cox home internet service. Fortunately, you can turn that hotspot off by going to cox.com/myprofile and signing in with your Cox credentials.

Cox might have software that does what a gaming router does, but Astound goes further and gives customers the option of renting a gaming router outright for $13 per month. Specifically, it's the Netgear Nighthawk XR1000 gaming router, which boasts high speeds, low latency and support for Wi-Fi 6, the newest (and fastest) generation of Wi-Fi.

$13 per month is a pretty fair price here as far as ISPs are concerned. In a lot of cases, you'll 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 $370 if you were to buy it outright, so you could rent one from Astound for nearly two years 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.