CityFibre And Kirklees College Partner To Launch Dedicated eSports Program

CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent full fibre platform, has partnered with Kirklees College to launch an eSports course that will be held at the college’s new fit-for-purpose eSports room. The curriculum will include a coding workshop with local BAFTA-nominated game designer, Zach Cundall, and the college ultimately plans to launch its own team.

Competitive online gaming, dubbed eSports, is becoming a huge spectator sport and a growing fixture in households across the UK. It is opening lucrative new career paths for competitive gamers, with some prize-pools in the millions, and attracted over 400 million viewers in 2020.

To support this exciting sector, Kirklees College has established a dedicated eSports room, with the support of CityFibre, that will play host to students on the course and form a base for the Kirklees eSports team. The course will cover all aspects of the gaming industry, including games, teams and tournaments, streaming, planning an event, establishing an eSports organisation, starting an enterprise within the industry and promoting positive health and wellbeing.

With any slowdown in connection – known as lag – the difference between digital life and death in online battles, the team will benefit from a CityFibre full fibre connection. This offers speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps for upload and download, near limitless bandwidth and connectivity they can depend on.

As part of the course, CityFibre is funding a coding workshop with BAFTA-nominated game designer and Yorkshire native, Zach Cundall. The suite of content will be delivered via interactive sessions with live chat over Discord and will teach students how to utilise leading 3D creation platform, Unreal Engine.

Steve Moore, City Manager at CityFibre, said: “eSports has truly exploded in popularity in recent years and we’re excited to support Kirklees College as it grows in this space. We are no longer talking about gaming being a niche audience - this is a mainstream industry and it’s great to see this reflected in what Kirklees College offers to its students.

“Beyond financial support we’re also hopeful that the network we’re building in Huddersfield, as well as those across the UK, will play an important role in overcoming poor connectivity barriers for gamers, students and developers alike.”

Furkan Uddin, Curriculum Area Manager for Business Management, IT and Digital Computing at Kirklees College added: “We are excited to be working in partnership with CityFibre on the launch of our eSports room. eSports is becoming increasingly popular and the introduction of this course has allowed us to expand our offer to reflect the needs of the industry and position ourselves as a leading provider of digital technologies in the region. This new state-of-the-art room will allow us to create an inspiring learning environment with cutting-edge technology to provide our students with a solid foundation to build a successful gaming career.”

Since 2016, CityFibre has invested £30m in Huddersfield to lay a new network that uses the best available technology – full fibre – to give nearly every home and business the digital foundation they need to thrive today, tomorrow and in decades to come.

Already, thousands of Huddersfield residents are benefitting from full fibre broadband, with services now live and available across the town through a range of broadband providers. Across the UK, CityFibre is already working with launch partner Vodafone to supply full fibre infrastructure for customers on selected Vodafone Pro Broadband plans, as well as TalkTalk, with other providers expected to join the network soon.