Equipment requirement for a very large Lan party (~1000 people eventually)

[Alternaut]

Hello, I am planning to do several Lan parties in 100 people increments starting at 100 people and hopefully getting to a 1,000 connections simultaneously in two years from now.

My question is, what equipment will I need and what is roughly going to be the cost? Games at the lan party will both be playable at local network (such as CS) as well as online (such as LoL).

I know it's quite vague, but in what equipment should I be investing from the beginning if I would like to head to a 1,000 event (lets say venue capabilities are able to support 1-2 Mbps/person download and 100-300 Kbps upload).

By my thinking I would imagine in each event I will need to add a router to support 4 switchers at 24 ports (96 users in total per router).

PS. There will be no WiFi allowed, so all connections will strictly be through a wire, therefore a router does not need to have WiFi capabilities

 

[okcnaline]

Bring computer or no?

At the base line, that's going to be run by servers and lots of ethernet ports.

 

[Alternaut]

Yes, bring your own computer, can you recommend or at least give me some estimate as to what server i will be needing?

 

[Alabalcho]

Have you plan the logistics and cbling?
Hundred people with gaming desktops means at least 100KW power consumption. Means one hundred runs of Ethernet cable. Means AC system capable of dissipating the heat of 100 computers. You cannot do that on the county' fairgrounds over the weekend. It is also not just connecting a couple of switches together and boom - you have 1000-nodes network.

Hire a professional. This is not your college' LAN party.

 

[bill001g]

The companies that do this generally do not buy the equipment they lease it for the time of the event. I know thing like dreamhack in sweden made a deal with cisco to run it for them and got some discount for advertising the fact that they were using cisco gear.

Best bet is to just hire a company to do it for you leasing the equipment including all installation. There are a number of companies that specialize in doing computer stuff for conventions etc. It costs a lot but it is fraction of the costs you would pay to actually purchase the equipment and then hire all the labor to install this in a timely manner. It would take you many days to run 1000 ethernet cables by yourself.

You are not even close on your design when you are talking about routers and do not know that you need layer 3 switches instead. Hire a professional.

 

[Kewlx25]

Ignoring the network, power, and cooling issues, the router would need to be heavily customized to keep low latency. You'll need to learn or hire someone that can do proper traffic shaping. And no, it's as as easy as setting priorities.

 

[Alternaut]

The companies that do this generally do not buy the equipment they lease it for the time of the event. I know thing like dreamhack in sweden made a deal with cisco to run it for them and got some discount for advertising the fact that they were using cisco gear.

Best bet is to just hire a company to do it for you leasing the equipment including all installation. There are a number of companies that specialize in doing computer stuff for conventions etc. It costs a lot but it is fraction of the costs you would pay to actually purchase the equipment and then hire all the labor to install this in a timely manner. It would take you many days to run 1000 ethernet cables by yourself.

You are not even close on your design when you are talking about routers and do not know that you need layer 3 switches instead. Hire a professional.

Do you know of any Canadian companies that specialize in such? Thanks for the answer, very informing!