Do you live in an area with a pretty bad internet connection? Have you lost many battle royal games because of the lag suddenly teleporting you within an inch of an enemy’s rifle? Do you have $15 to drop on a service that will smooth out your online multiplayer connections?
If your answer to all of this is yes and if you live in the US, then Cox, currently the fourth largest cable internet service provider in the States, has a solution for you. Cox has been recently testing out an ‘Elite Gamer’ service in some select areas, which basically gives paying customers access to a dedicated gaming network. According to Variety, this gaming network is a packaging of WTFast, an earlier service that provides a private network that isolates and prioritizes game packets over everything else, which ends up optimizing the path data travels to and from a game’s servers.
The service costs $14.99, which is similar to what WTFast already offers, making it seem that this repackaging is useless if you are already enrolled in WTFast’s services. Cox has also ensured that the service will reduce the lag you experience by 34 percent, ping spikes by 55 percent and jitter by 45 percent.
There are, however, numerous caveats to using a GPN like WTFast and the ‘Elite Gamer’ service that Cox is offering. For one, your distance to the server is still calculated by the “hops” done by data. The greater number these “hops” are, the more lag you will experience. While the GPN services use their own private routes to provide paying customers with a faster route to the server, you are still bound by your base internet speed.
What this basically means is that using Cox Elite Gamer with your Cox internet connection is redundant, since you will still have to rely on your internet speed. It might even be better to spend that $15 on a better deal on internet services with faster data streaming than what you were using before.
So does this discount the effectiveness of GPN services like WTFast? Not at all. I would just argue that their usefulness increases with the base speed of your internet, and as such, is only necessary if you have a fast connection already.
