Garage LAN or Mega LAN?

On the surface, the differences between your average garage LAN and a Mega-LAN are not apparent. But the truth is that behind the scenes they are very different. The first obvious difference is the head count. At your average home LAN party, you're probably looking at around twelve people in attendance, although I've seen upwards of 30 people! Even that rather large home LAN attendance, however, pales in comparison to the hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in attendance at a Mega LAN.

Another major difference is that a Mega LAN typically is more formally organized, including an actual agenda with planned tournaments. Many large parties also have food and drink available for sale while garage LANs may purchase shared food from contributions to a pot.

Last, but not least, the network infrastructure is vastly different for garage and Mega parties. Hundreds of users place an exponential load on a network that won't be handled very well by just plugging everyone into cascaded 10/100 switches. I'll go into more details regarding LAN design in my next article, "Building and Maintaining the LAN".

I have summarized the basic differences between small and large LAN parties in Table 1.

Got Cash?

Setting up a garage LAN might set you back between nothing at all and $150 depending on equipment you may already have. But getting the kind of equipment you need to properly run a Mega party could run into the tens of thousands of dollars! Some things can be rented, others can be bought, but in the end a balance sheet will be required to run these huge events - there's no way around it. Table 2 has some numbers to clue you to the kind of money you'll need to get started.

As you can see, the big guys are either digging deep into their own pockets, have a major investor, or perhaps have corporate sponsors that are furnishing equipment or cash in exchange for advertising and / or marketing at the events.

If you're still interested after seeing those dollar figures, read on and we'll get you going!

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