If You're Really Serious About Online Gaming, Move to North Dakota

One interesting find from our annual look at the Best Gaming ISPs is that North Dakota comes out on top, earning it a Gaming Quality Index score of 26.9. Lower numbers are better here; the average for all states is 51.3.

How does this happen? It helps to be a state with few ISPs. When a state has only one or two high-quality broadband providers, the average for the state remains low. North Dakota has just one ISP that garnered results from more than 100 speed tests (our cutoff for inclusion)—Midco, aka Midcontinent Communications. It's a regional fiber provider for the Dakotas plus areas of Kansas and Wisconsin. Comcast owns just under half the company.

Midco’s quality rating is 21.7 across all its services. In North Dakota, Midco’s Gaming Quality index score is 15.2, which helps keep the state's average quality level at 26.9—because there are far fewer tests to affect the average quality.

Compare that with Colorado, which is home to the best gaming ISP we saw this year, Nextlight—local broadband run by the utility company of Longmont. It earns a Gaming Quality index score of 5.2 across all of its connections. But there are several other ISPs in that state, and they push the average score for Colorado up to 34.3.

This isn’t too surprising. Colorado has about 7.4 times the number of residents of North Dakota—5.8 million compared with 779,094 as per the 2020 census. But states with fast, high-quality ISPs and lots of competition can stay in the running, which is demonstrated by states like California and Colorado. All it takes is a few overachieving ISPs, such as California’s Sonic (with a score of 7.0 for the state) or Colorado’s Nextlight and Fort Collins Connexion (5.6).

To check out the top gaming ISP for each state in the US, pass your cursor or fingertip over each state in the interactive map below.

For even more information on the top gaming ISPs found in each state—including a searchable list of high-quality ISPs in every state—plus the best quality providers in metro cities, regions, and nationwide, and the full methodology, read The Best Gaming ISPs for 2023.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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