27,000 attend Insomnia56 gaming festival at Birmingham NEC
More than 27,000 computer game enthusiasts attended the five-day Insomnia56 gaming festival at Birmingham NEC, with many of them playing games around the clock as part of tournaments and competitions.
The event ran 24-hours a day from November 10 to 14, the first time this kind of event has been held at the National Exhibition Centre. Around 1,500 of those attending were described as the BYOC – Bring Your Own Computers – community, who turned up and plugged in their own consoles, many of them remaining online throughout the festival.
Read Steven Ecott's review of the festival on Native Monster here
The NEC's catering arm, Amadeus, even teamed up with QJacker to offer an app to enable the BYOC community to order food and drink on-line and have it delivered to their stations.
The NEC provided power and an internet connection for each member of the BYOC and console community for the duration of the event, requiring a huge bandwidth.
In order to deal with this demand, the venue worked alongside its Internet Service Provider, Colt, to install a new 10Gbps internet pipe.
It was the first time the event had been held at NEC since its move from the Ricoh Arena at Coventry. Craig Fletcher, founder and CEO at organisers Multiplay, said "We are delighted to have worked with the NEC to deliver our biggest and best Insomnia gaming festival."
