Hurricane Electric, an IPv6-native Internet backbone, recently announced it has connected to more than 200 unique Internet exchanges. When announcing the milestone 200th exchange connection, the company said, “As an early leader in the switch to IPv6, Hurricane Electric now connects to the largest number of networks on the planet for both IPv6 and IPv4, and has been at the forefront of providing high-speed Internet connectivity to organizations throughout the world using 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and 1 Gigabit Ethernet connections. As a result of the improved connectivity with these 200 exchanges, customers receive the benefit of lower latency, higher throughput and increased fault tolerance.”
Hurricane Electric employs fiber-optic technology, and has five redundant 100-Gbit paths crossing North America, five separate 100-Gbit paths between the United States and Europe, and 100-Gigabit rings in Europe and Asia. It also has a ring around Africa and a point of presence (PoP) in Australia. A schematic of Hurricane Electric's global connectivity is pictured above, and can be viewed in more detail here.
“This reliable connectivity is especially important as global IP traffic continues to increase,” the provider said. “Cisco’s Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Trends, 2017-2022 predicts the annual global IP traffic will reach 4.8 zettabytes per year by 2022, or 396 exabytes per month—triple the 2017 rate.”
Mike Leber, president of Hurricane Electric, observed that the company’s goal “has always been to provide as much Internet service as possible to as many people as possible. It’s exciting to reach this milestone, ensuring that we have as much local connectivity as possible in each geographic market that we are present in. Continuing to connect to more locations will provide our customers and others with fewer hops, reduced latency, and greater throughput.”
