Best broadband for gaming: what actually matters

Gaming asks three things of a connection, in this order: low latency, a stable line and enough upload to cover whatever you stream. Raw download speed comes a distant fourth, because a multiplayer game sends tiny packets back and forth and barely touches your bandwidth. What it cannot tolerate is delay.

Ping, measured in milliseconds, is how long a packet takes to reach the server and come back. Under 20 ms is excellent, 20 to 50 ms is good and above 100 ms you start to feel the lag between your thumb and the screen. There is more to say about what a good ping is and how to lower it, but the headline is simple: a sharp connection is a low-ping one, and that is mostly about the kind of line you have and how you have wired it, not the speed tier you pay for.

If you can get full fibre, get full fibre. It is the best gaming connection by a distance, and the reasons are exactly the ones gamers care about. It has the lowest latency of any home line, often just a few milliseconds on the line itself, because light through glass is about as fast as it gets. It is symmetric or close to it, so your upload matches your download, which matters the moment you stream or party-chat. And it holds steady in the evening when the whole street piles on, where older lines wobble.

Old part-copper FTTC lines add latency and sag under load, so they are the weakest gaming option still widely sold. Cable, the Virgin Media network, gives huge download speeds but its upload is capped low and its latency is a touch higher than full fibre, so it is fine for solo play and downloads but not the sharpest for competitive multiplayer. 5G home broadband is a reasonable fallback where no fibre has reached, with latency around 20 to 40 ms, but it is less predictable than a wire in the ground. If you want all of them set side by side, the comparison is short and unflattering to copper.

Here is where most gamers overspend. A gigabit package will not lower your ping, and the game itself uses almost no bandwidth, so the giant number does nothing for your play. What a bigger line does buy is faster downloads of those 90GB updates, and headroom when other people in the house are streaming at the same time.

For most gaming households a 100 to 300 Mbps full-fibre line is the sweet spot: low latency, plenty of headroom and a fraction of the price of the top tier. Buy gigabit only if several people genuinely hammer the line at once, not because a package promised it was best for gaming. Do the maths on what speed you actually need and for most homes it lands well short of gigabit.

Once you are on a good line, how you connect to it decides your ping more than which provider you chose. Three things matter, and the first is worth more than the rest combined.

Wire in. A wired ethernet cable from your console or PC to the router strips 10 to 30 ms off your ping and removes the jitter wifi adds, which is why every serious player is plugged in. If you cannot run a cable, get as close to the router as you can and use the 5GHz band. Second, the router: most modern ISP hubs are fine, but a houseful of devices fighting for the line will lift your ping, so it is worth checking whether your router is the problem before you blame the deal. Third, clear the decks during a session, pause the big downloads and kick the 4K stream off, and your game gets the responsiveness it needs. The full list of fixes is in how to speed up your broadband.

Pulling it together, the checklist for a gaming line is short. Full fibre if you can get it, for the latency and the upload. A sensible 100 to 300 Mbps tier rather than the gigabit halo, unless the household load genuinely needs more. Unlimited data, which all fixed lines are, so a 90GB update never costs you. And a quick look at whether the provider manages traffic at peak, though on full fibre this is rarely an issue.

The altnets are worth a serious look here, because their full-fibre networks tend to be newer, symmetric and keenly priced, and several reach gigabit for around £25. A recognisable logo is not the same as a better line for gaming. If your current deal feels dear for what it delivers, our overpayment check will tell you in a minute whether you are over the odds.

So before you buy a fancy gigabit package for gaming, get on full fibre, wire your console in and check your ping. Here are the live full-fibre deals at your address, the connection that gives gaming the lowest floor, from the cheapest going to the fastest.