Don’t let a spotty connection ruin your raid. Using exclusive results from hundreds of thousands of PCMag Speed Tests, we’ve ranked the US broadband providers with the best connections based on speed, jitter, latency, and other key factors for gamers.
Have you ever wanted to throw your controller at the screen because your game lags and stutters due to a poor internet connection? You’re not alone. A survey from Liquid Web finds that 95% of gamers have experienced such latency issues, and 78% „rage quit“ their playtime because of them. The anger and frustration stays with 16% of them even after they walked away from the game.
Don’t be a rage quitter. You can achieve a rock-solid broadband connection with low latency and jitter by upgrading your home networking equipment, switching to Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi, and, of course, picking an ISP that delivers a high-quality connection. Fiber broadband now has 60% household coverage in the US and „significant untapped potential for growth“, according to research from the Fiber Broadband Association.
Fiber optics to the home is likely to help with latency, but it isn’t a guarantee that the packets will stream steadily. A gamer’s best bet is to find an ISP with consistently low latency. That’s the reason for this annual feature.
To help determine the best ISP where you live, we gather the data from hundreds of thousands of PCMag Speed Tests performed in the US. We begin with an examination of an ISP’s median jitter and latency scores and combine them into a quality index; we factor in the speed based on upload/download medians; we utilize price and coverage numbers from our data partner BroadbandNow; then top it all off with ratings by you, our audience, sourced from our annual Readers’ Choice ISPs survey.
The result is our Cumulative Gaming ISP Index, designed to make fair, apples-to-apples comparisons between ISPs. It helps us pinpoint the top gaming providers both nationwide and across the US.
(For a more thorough explanation, including changes since last year’s story, read our complete methodology.)
This is our definitive guide to broadband providers that deliver exactly what you need for gaming. It factors in throughput (speed) but isn’t a slave to it. Quality gets its due. In fact, that last factor is so important that this year we’re adding the Highest Quality ISP award for each region of the country and the nation as a whole, regardless of speed, coverage, or price.
Want to become part of the story? Take the PCMag Speed Test to contribute data for your ISP. If you live north of the border, be sure to check out our ranking of The Best Gaming ISPs for 2026: Canada.The Best Major Gaming ISPs for 2026
For our purposes, a „major“ ISP is one with a large customer base (over one million) that spans multiple states (at least four), and, most germane to this story, has garnered a minimum of one thousand tests in the last year.
For many years—from the start of our reporting on Best Gaming ISPs in 2015 through 2024, when we completely overhauled our methodology—Verizon Fios was typically the top ISP for quality and speed. But last year, GFiber (formerly Google Fiber) took the crown. This year, GFiber proves it has staying power. It is once again the Best Gaming ISP, thanks to its excellent cumulative score, largely due to high numbers for gaming quality, pricing, and reader satisfaction. That last score is particularly noteworthy: a fantastic 9.5 out of 10.
„GFiber is mostly building and operating modern fiber networks with cleaner routing, fewer ‚mystery hops‘, and less congestion drama than legacy cable footprints“, says Tyler Cooper, the editor-in-chief of BroadbandNow. „It helps that they haven’t focused as much on rapid expansion in the past few years. When you control the last mile and you play an active role in engineering the backbone, you have a major advantage by taking this measured approach.“
GFiber isn’t the fastest ISP in the list—that designation goes to Ezee Fiber this time around. Ezee, with customers in Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Washington State, posts a speed index more than double that of the next best (MetroNet).
Meanwhile, two ISPs, GFiber and MetroNet, both receive the same test scores for median latency (5 milliseconds) and jitter (1 millisecond), earning an index of 20 out of 20 on our quality scale. We break the tie between them by looking at the speed index. That means MetroNet—a previous winner for Fastest ISP—earns the title of Best Quality ISP nationwide. (Ezee, the fastest of the lot, has a bit more latency than the others, as does Fios. Throughput and quality don’t always match up.)
There are some other scores we should note here. Frontier has the best rating for price by just a hair over GFiber, MetroNet, and Ezee (in that order). Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, but came back by focusing on fiber. Early next year, Verizon will acquire the company for approximately $20 billion.
