QuakeCon?s 2004 Tournament LANs Built on High Performance Linksys Switches



IRVINE, CA -/August 12, 2004 - Wi-Fi Technology News/- Linksys?, a Division of Cisco Systems, Inc., the leading provider of broadband, wireless and networking hardware for the consumer and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) markets, announced it will supply all the networking hardware to build the gaming network for the 2004 QuakeCon? video game festival and tournament in Grapevine Texas, August. 12 - 15, 2004.

Linksys will provide two-hundred 24-Port 10/100 Ethernet Switches with Gigabit expansion slots and two-hundred Gigabit Ethernet Modules for gigabit connectivity to the network backbone. The Linksys switches will provide up to 4,600 connections for gamers to play their favorite id titles against one another. Gamers from all over the world will be coming to play head-to-head gaming at this massive LAN party.

This year?s Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) gaming network is the largest in the nation. With over 3,500 computers and servers, participants can bring their own computers and play games such as DOOM 3?, QUAKE III Arena?, Return to Castle Wolfenstein?, Enemy Territory? and other games. Gamers who bring their own computers equipped with LAN cards simply plug into the switches which will be set on all the table tops in the BYOC area. The switches will be the gamer?s link to the network operations center (NOC) in which they can play well over 400 games hosted on the game servers simultaneously. QuakeCon?s 2004 sponsors include id Software, NVIDIA, Activision, AMD, Chenbro, VIA and Linksys.

?This is our sixth year sponsoring this event and supporting it with our switches,? said Mike Wagner, Linksys global director of marketing. ?Having more than 3,500 gamers connecting to the network 24 hours a day for 4 straight days can be an intense network environment, but our switches are built for the extreme. We know many of our customers are gamers, so providing the switches to the tournament enables us to thank these customers.? This network gaming phenomenon has had an increase of attendance of 50 percent year-over-year in the past several years, due to the popularity of id Software?s famed DOOM, QUAKE?, and Wolfenstein series of games. Despite its magnitude, the entire QuakeCon network of Linksys switches is fully built and operational in less than 24 hours.

This years 8th annual QuakeCon event is expected to draw more than 6,000 attendees. With one large exhibit hall encompassing over 170,000 square feet, divided into 5 rooms, this years QuakeCon will be held just outside of Dallas at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas from August 12-15.

For more information on QuakeCon 2004 visit http://www.quakecon.org.


About Linksys

Founded in 1988, Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems, Inc., (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the global leader in Wireless and Ethernet networking for consumer and SOHO users. Linksys is dedicated to making networking easy and affordable for its customers, offering innovative, award-winning products that seamlessly integrate with a variety of devices and applications. Linksys provides 24/7 Grade ?A? product support to all its customers. For more information, visit the Linksys web site at http://www.linksys.com.