The Best Gaming ISPs for Canada 2019

The gaming needs of the people of Canada are just like those of people anywhere else: they need a high-quality connection, which isn't exactly the same as a high-speed connection.

Because the methodology used to come up with the Best Gaming ISPs for Canada is the same as it is for the United States, you can read about it in full there. But the short version is: instead of only considering the speed of the ISP (creating an index number from the upload and download speeds that is used for comparison), we consider the quality of the connection for the gaming story by adding together the numbers for jitter and latency garnered from our Speed Test.

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That number we get from adding jitter to latency we call the PCMag Gaming Quality Index. The lower the number, the better the quality of the connection for gamers.

All the info below is from data gathered in calendar year 2018. We had 39,266 tests performed by PCMag readers in Canada.

Canada's Best Gaming ISPs 2019

The last two times we looked at the best ISPs for play up north, Cogeco Cable came out on top. And while Cogeco definitely saw improvement over the last couple of years, dropping its Gaming Quality Index from 50.9 to 37.1, it didn't keep them in first place. That's because every ISP in Canada seems to be improving in quality, so much so that smaller ISPs that had enough tests to be included (we required at least 100) pushed Cogeco back to the No. 8 slot in the top 10 of quality.

In first place this time around is Virgin Mobile. Sure, Virgin's a mobile provider, but it also has fixed-broadband home internet services up to 100Mbps. Our tests don't even really differentiate the mobile vs. fixed broadband, but it doesn't really matter when the average quality comes out to 27.9, the best Gaming Quality score we've seen out of any Canadian ISP.

Second place goes to Shaw Communications at 31.7. While it's a big ISP in Alberta and British Columbia and other provices, Shaw's another newbie to this list—as is third place Sogetel (32.5) out of Québec.

The bigger-name ISPs we're all familiar with fill out much of the back-end of this Best Gaming top 10, including Bell Canada, Bell Aliant, Telus (our Fastest Mobile Network winner for 2018), and Rogers, with a few other newbies like B2B2C and Carry Telecom sneaking in.

It's always interesting to see how ISPs with such high-quality (low latency) connections fare in the speed department. The chart below shows the ISPs in the top 10 in the same order, but it's clear that in Canada, low latency doesn't equal killer speed. The fastest providers are the fiber-happy Bells, followed by mega-cable provider Rogers. When it comes to speed, Virgin Mobile would only be in eighth place, but if we were looking only at the PCMag Speed Index, Virgin wouldn't even be in the top 10—more like No. 18. But for gaming, even the slowest broadband speed is enough, as the low-latency quality connection outdoes all.

Best Gaming ISPs 2019 by Province, City

If you were a professional gamer in Canada looking to move to the right spot for the very best quality internet connection, where should you go? The last time we looked the answer was Quebec, which had an average Gaming Quality of 57.2. This time around, go west.

The lowest score (which means the best quality) goes to British Columbia, with a 34.0, thanks to excellent connections from Shaw and Telus. Alberta is second with a 41.5 via the same providers.

By city and town, the town of Orillia, Ontario, tops the chart for gaming quality thanks to a killer set of tests performed by users of Rogers. The town average Gaming Quality score is 22.5, which is better than the national average for our big winner Virgin Mobile, and goes to show that smaller municipalities sometimes get a little extra. Orillia is followed by Deroche, BC, at 22.9 via tests from Shaw, and Richmond, BC, at 24.1 thanks to Shaw and Telus, mainly. The two biggest cities that show in the tests are Toronto and Montreal, naturally, but neither have particularly great gaming quality scores, with Toronto at 53.1 and Montreal at 56.3.

Don't forget to keep testing that internet connection.

Curious about your broadband internet speed? Test it now!

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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