Game on! Delivering high-performance technology to the esports industry with Lumen

For players within the esports industry — an industry valued at more than $1 billion — a winning move can happen in a matter of milliseconds. It’s a competitive edge the BlackStar Group embraces and relies upon when it produces high-profile esports events. And it’s why they’ve partnered with Lumen to deliver best-in-class technology and high-performance networks to the esports industry.

“We have esports teams that are amazed at the milliseconds of latency they experienced to access game servers and gain that competitive advantage. We know that we can rely on Lumen to minimize latency and make those things happen,” said Adam Flynn, Chief Marketing Officer, BlackStar Group.

BlackStar delivers best-in-class technology to many of the largest names in the esports industry, providing services for music festivals, trade shows and conferences, debates and lectures, and experiential marketing.

“We work closely with Lumen to provide unsurpassed network reliability and resilience for transportation, broadcasts and connectivity when it matters most,” said Chris Hendrie, CEO of BlackStar Group.

What it takes to win: Setting the bar in the esports event industry

Recently Lumen played a critical role in supporting BlackStar’s success at the 2023 Halo Championship Series.

“We have a hard requirement from our clients to manage all the ISP circuits. The original failover from circuit to circuit took 60 seconds. With Lumen, at our rack, it took 300 milliseconds. We built everything to prioritize both gameplay and video, which means every packet lost affects the video and affects the gameplay, so that failover must be as fast as possible,” said Hendrie.

For comparison, a single eye blink takes about 400 milliseconds.

Leveling up with dedicated technology and hands-on service

Partnering with Lumen, BlackStar said they improved efficiency and the customer experience, as well as decreased costs for clients. “Working with a tier one provider like Lumen is absolutely essential in getting the competitive advantage in esports,” said Flynn.

BlackStar implemented Lumen^® Dedicated Internet Access to deliver secure, low loss streaming and gameplay support at a global distribution level. Lumen Data Centers deliver fast, reliable connections to BlackStar clients virtually anywhere with a high availability, low-latency network.

Game on: Building an industry powerhouse by helping clients win

This partnership between BlackStar Group and Lumen is set to revolutionize the esports industry with cutting-edge technology and hands-on service.

Looking ahead, Hendrie said, “BlackStar is thrilled to hear about the Network-as-a-Service offering from Lumen. NaaS has the potential to empower BlackStar to better serve our live event clients with expanded options and flexibility for the expected speed, low latency bandwidth and quality service for which we’re known.”

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