Cox Communications will become one of the first major internet companies to offer an internet service specifically for gamers, though its exact launch date has not yet been confirmed.
While internet companies have claimed for years that faster speeds offer a better gaming experience in their marketing campaigns, Cox is the first among them to actually back up the claim. The new service will be called Cox Elite Gamer, and according to techrader.com, it promises to reduce lag spikes and lower latency. According to sources within Cox, this is accomplished by giving subscribers a less congested networking path to the server they are trying to connect to.
Like Google Fiber, Cox Elite Gamer isn't going to be immediately rolled out across the country. Instead, the company will run a three-month trial within the state of Arizona to determine how well the service runs in practice. Consumers within the state of Arizona will have to purchase a standard package from Cox, as well as pay an additional $15.00 a month for the new service. Customers will be given a piece of software that configures their connection based on the game they are playing.
With the increased demand for bandwidth from the average user and network node congestion problems plaguing customers in certain areas, this will be seen as a welcome change to services currently being offered. You're probably wondering, like we were, if this would affect normal Cox customers in terms of their quality of service. When asked by both consumers and publications, Cox is pretty adamant that it will not. Regardless of the outcome, it at least shows that Internet companies are starting to listen to consumer wants and desires as it relates to quality of service.
In theory, something like this could work, but we can't help but be skeptical. After all, Cox isn't making the claim that you will have faster internet speed, but rather that your connection stability will improve over their standard packages. So, unless you can test the standard package over a long period of time before upgrading, there's no real way of knowing if there is a discernible difference. Having paid for "Turbo" internet service in the past myself, I can see why people would be hesitant to pay extra for such a service. It also begs the question, if they can do this with their new service, what was stopping them from offering similar stability with their old service? One thing is for sure: if Cox is successful in their endeavor, we can expect to see other internet service providers quickly follow suit.