E-sports is becoming mainstream. We are at the early stages of the sport and it is expected to grow dramatically.
It may have taken a few more years for e-sports to fully blossom, but one thing we can count on in 2020 is change, and there has been a change in tide. A wave has come in to disrupt what most of us think about sports, brought about by our global Covid-19 pandemic. For the most part, spectator sports were halted while health standards for our sport players and teams were evaluated in order to relaunch and having condensed seasons in traditional sports.
While traditional spectator sports were being re-evaluated for Covid-19 precautions, e-sports was riding a tidal wave by quickly being adopted as a spectator sport to fill the void. It’s fair to say that e-sports are here to stay. The largest areas are China, North America, India and the America’s. China TenCent is building e-sports arenas. Here in the U.S, we are seeing the education sector gaining momentum. In fact, there are 175 colleges and universities that officially offer varsity esports programs. These schools offer full or partial athletic scholarships. There is over $16 million available in scholarships.[[i]](https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/798172352/as-esports-take-off-high-school-leagues-get-in-the-game)
In terms of High School, according to The High School Esports League, they have 2,100 partner schools in the U.S and Canada. The North America Scholastic Esports Federation has grown to over 1000 clubs. [[ii]](https://www.nasef.org/clubs/locations/)
All of these professional, collegiate or high school teams need one thing to make this all work. They need low latency connectivity to properly game. Ideally, they need 100ms or less of latency.
With so much at stake from available scholarships, millions of dollars in winning purses milliseconds may be the difference between a scholarship or a large pay day. Long latencies can cause images to disappear and e-sports athletes missing a move that could have made a difference between a “W” and a Lose.
Here at ALE, we have reliable and fault resilient low latency switches that ensures players can be their best. Like the OmniSwitch 6860 or the OmniSwitch 6900.
And let’s not forget about the spectators. Spectators require high speed Wi-Fi to keep them connected to social media. Wi-Fi 6 Stellar access points makes a great solution to keep the social media influencers do what they do.
No matter what stage of the sport either as a participant or a spectator, it is critical to have the network infrastructure to support it.