Best internet providers for gaming 2024

In 2023, Verizon rolled out its fiber optic network. While not available in every region, its availability is increasing all the time. If you live in one of the areas covered so far, you could enjoy an internet connection with speeds of up to 2,000Mbps.

The fastest plan is pricey, but this connection will make gaming and streaming games smoother. If the 2,000Mbps plan is too much for you, three others offer 300Mbps, 500Mbps, and 1,000Mbps connections (with a tiered pricing structure). They all come with a guaranteed price lock of two to four years, and you’re also not bound by a contract for any length of time, either, so you can change plans, or move to another ISP.

Verizon Fios has a +play Monthly Credit add-on to the plans to give you access to several services including Xbox Game Pass. Overall, Verizon is a great all-rounder if you’re not on a budget.

If you prioritize internet speeds above all else, we recommend AT&T Internet. Where Verizon Fios offers speeds of up to 2,000Mbps, AT&T more than doubles that with a maximum of 5,000Mbps.

There’s not a great deal that AT&T Internet offers gamers specifically, but several perks are there to entice new customers, including ActiveArmor; a suite of features (including a VPN) designed to enhance your safety online.

AT&T’s Extended Wi-Fi Coverage gives you up to five extenders to eliminate dead zones in your home, which is more useful in bigger houses. These benefits only apply to fiber optic plans, though.

Standard DSL plans (between 300 – 1,000Mbps) are notably more expensive than you get with Verizon Fios. AT&T Internet is great for speed, but if that’s not everything to you, you’re probably better off with a different provider.

If you need a budget internet provider, we recommend Xfinity. Plans go as low as just under $10 a month for access, although this is only available to customers living in certain areas. The next plan up is $20 a month, and still notably cheaper than most plans from other ISPs.

It’s reasonable to be concerned that a cheaper price tag may mean a slow service. Xfinity’s most affordable plan still gives you speeds of 150Mbps which, while far from the fastest internet speeds available, are still speedy enough for most games. There are two catches though.

With the cheaper plans, you’ll be locked into a contract. Xfinity also often gives lower rates to new customers but jacks them up after certain lengths of time. Xfinity pricing changes depending on your state (and fiber connections aren’t available in some). Nonetheless, you’re still likely to find that its prices are generally lower than competitors.

You can get further savings with one of Xfinity’s bundle deals. While it lacks Game Pass offers (or anything directly gaming-related), there are quite a few options for streaming service bundle deals, including Netflix, Apple TV, and Peacock (and hey, Netflix is slowly venturing into gaming territory). You can also bundle it with mobile plans if you’re looking to find a new cell phone provider.

If you use Astound as your ISP, you can expand your monthly plans to include the Netgear Nighthawk XR1000 gaming routers. This router has been specifically optimized for gamers and is ideal for keeping ping and latency low.

With this plan, you’re renting the Netgear Nighthawk XR1000, rather than owning it. However, the monthly rental fees will surpass the outright costs after about a year and a half, so you might decide that you’d prefer to buy one yourself. Though, of course, if you rent it, you also have the added benefit of having Astound maintenance teams look after it, which you’d not get if you bought it yourself.

One of the biggest setbacks of Astoud is its range of availability. If you’re living in a rural area, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that you won’t be able to use it. It’s a pity because if you are in one of its covered regions, you can enjoy speeds of up to 1500Mbps which are well-suited for gaming.

Depending on the deal you go for, you may get an extra $100 Amazon gift card, which you can use to stock up on gaming hardware. You can also bundle streaming access to tick all your entertainment boxes, rather than just gaming. Just be sure you’ve checked what you’re paying as you check out, as hardware installation fees and other additions can take you by surprise.

When people hear the name T-Mobile, they’re most likely to think of its mobile phone service, but in 2021 it branched into home internet provider territory. The customers surveyed for the American Customer Satisfaction Index rated it the best of all the non-fiber internet providers.

You’ll also find a broad selection of plans to suit all needs, from simple home setups to business options. If you’ve found that many of the big options aren’t available in your area, you may be pleased that T-Moible Home Internet covers a broader range than other ISPs (including Verizon). There will still be a lot of remote areas that won’t be covered by it, but you’ve got a higher chance of getting a T-Mobile connection than many others.

One of the cool bundle packages that T-Mobile Home Internet has to offer includes the Home Internet Backup. You can probably guess that this gives you a backup if the internet goes down, with a monthly allowance of 130GB of backup data. Having your ISP drop just before you sit down to an online gaming session at the end of a long day is infuriating, and this backup allowance should cover you in pretty much all circumstances. You could probably depend on it exclusively for a whole week, and T-Mobile’s internet service isn’t likely to drop for that long (even in increments) over a month.

However, despite offering 5G connections, it’s worth noting that T-Mobile Home Internet’s connection speeds cap out at 245Mbps, notably less than the speeds offered by many other providers which can often surpass 1,000Mbps. However, don’t forget that you can have a perfectly satisfying connection at just 100Mbps and many of the larger amounts are potentially going to be overkill just for general everyday gaming.

We nominate Frontier as the best internet provider for streaming for several reasons. For one thing, it offers a relatively affordable method of getting set up with a fiber optic connection, and for another, there are options for bundle plans with YouTube TV. For those who don’t know, this service enables you to watch live television through YouTube, and while it carries a hefty monthly fee, you can get $10 off every month through Frontier.

Its fantastic speeds also make it a good choice for streaming because, with the expensive plans reaching 5,000Mbps, it’s perfectly equipped to handle even the rigors of streaming a 4K movie without slowing down the rest of your internet or diminishing the quality. Naturally, you won’t have trouble playing even the most data-intensive online games.

Its biggest problem is probably its poor customer service. When you search for a review on Google, the first thing that comes up is a Reddit post with someone saying “Frontier is a terrible, scummy company.” While it is unfair to call it “terrible” because the internet service is pretty good, the critique highlights how exasperating dealing with the business can be.

To its credit, it often gives new customers gift cards and other bonuses when they sign up (such as pre-paid VISA reward cards). These change regularly and are usually pretty good – but we should caution that these often require you to accept some terms and conditions to access them. While these terms rarely include anything too sinister, you should read them carefully, as it’s not technically a contract-free provider with this in place. Besides this, you are genuinely getting an internet service with no contract, meaning you can cancel your plan at any time with no fee.