As the world’s first education institution with an exclusive relationship with the British Esports, and the only institution dedicated to making esports sustainable, the college set its eyes on an in-person venue that could handle large crowds for esports events and grow rapidly alongside the college. Most esports events use stadiums for their venues, so the Lee Valley VeloPark in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park stood out to the CoEs team.

The issue was that the VeloPark is a sporting venue, and traditionally sports venues don’t focus on IT requirements. We’ve all been at a football stadium with poor WiFi coverage, slow internet loading times and a generally sub-par user experience (naming no names, but if any of you want to improve your IT services… get in touch). The CoEs soon-to-be lecture rooms, Desktop PC gaming rooms and student social zone had little to no WLAN or LAN accessibility, and that is obviously not good enough for an esports college!

There were also other issues: CoEs needed an easily manageable IT system to manage their students’ logins, single sign on to college computers and virtual learning environments (VLEs).

After being recommended by another organisation to CoEs, Aspgate was chosen to supply, install and configure Firewalls, Switches, Access Points, Servers, Desktop PCs and Laptops across the entire site.

CoEs required an end-to-end, ground-up solutions with state of the art, high speed, low latency, highly resilient and scalable infrastructure to deliver industry-leading courses and provide an immersive gaming experience via high-end gaming desktops.

To achieve this, our team deployed a sub-milisecond fibre network spanning across the college campus, installing Ubiquiti WiFi 6 Access Points, 10GB switches and FortiGate firewalls.

After the network was installed, we deployed the end user devices into the campus, consisting of Desktop PCs and required software, alongside laptops and the licensed software required for lecturers. Aspgate built a domain to manage all users and PCs, fully managing all aspects of user account creation, remote assistance and providing expert support to staff and students. We also outsourced management of users and computers to the Aspgate Service Desk. Currently we ensure devices remain in line with cyber essentials and provide proactive monitoring of the entire campus network.

This was a challenging job but our team rose to the occasion magnificently.