Video: EICC Insomnia Gaming Festival

Gamer Event a Mission Accomplished Courtesy of Ultra-Fast Bandwidth

Unprecedented bandwidth speeds - among the fastest to be found in the UK - emerged as one of the major stars of the country’s largest gamer festival, which took place in Scotland for the first time.

Held on 29 April–02 May, the Insomnia Gaming Festival saw thousands of gaming enthusiasts converge on the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC), with the immense network speeds drawing plaudits from organisers and enthusiasts alike. 

As a client of Edinburgh based Commsworld, the EICC recently joined the ultra-fast gigabit capable Edinburgh CORE network, developed by infrastructure builder, CityFibre, and launched last May.

In order to provide the ultimate conditions for the event, the EICC’s connection was temporarily supercharged, allowing for some of the fastest network speeds present anywhere in the UK - up to an unprecedented ten gigabit per second.

Richard Lloyd, EICC’s Client ICT Manager, said: “The client for this event (Multiplay Events) needed services a little bit beyond our day-to-day offering. We had selected Commsworld as our supplier because they can provide that sort of flexibility and expertise, so we brought them in to provide the additional boost.

“Commsworld were able to meet the additional demand quickly, easily and on budget for the client, for a temporary installation.

“The network was great and extremely stable.  It is so important for this style of event, with gaming very much being an online activity. Bandwidth and stability are both essential and it was flawless.

“The Commsworld engineers were on site before the event to set up and test and we had access to those same engineers throughout the event to avoid any problems.

“In this industry it’s essential to have that relationship with your service provider. We needed flexibility and we need an understanding of the industry we’re working in and Commsworld provide us that in a way that most other suppliers we’ve looked at are not able to.

Craig Fletcher, CEO of Multiplay Events, the firm behind the Insomnia Gaming Festival, said: “Insomnia is a celebration of all things gaming. It’s an event that brings people from all walks of life together to celebrate the one thing that binds them together, a passion for gaming.

“It can be very technical, especially when you’re running a temporary network of hundreds or even thousands of PC’s. Network speeds are critical, most games you can’t play online without the internet so we need a very stable connection and brilliant performance.

“An added element that we showcase at Insomnia Gaming, is that it is now as much about viewing as it is playing and that itself needs high power infrastructure.”   

Commsworld, which has now grown to 63 staff, is the official partner to the Cityfibre Edinburgh CORE network, helping organisations in the capital achieve up to Gigabit speed connectivity through pure fibre infrastructure.