This week Hurricane Electric announced that it has connected to 100 different Internet exchanges. Hurricane Electric president Mike Leber says its Internet Backbone now has connections to more Internet peering exchanges than any other network on the Internet.
“Our network now spans 23 countries on four continents,” says Leber. “Our goal is to soon be in 100 countries.”
In the age of the cloud, internet exchanges have taken on added significance because cloud application providers are often trying to target specific geographic markets. As a result, there’s a lot of interest in making sure that application traffic remains in the same geographic region as the data centers being used to deliver access to a specific class to application services.
Among large network operators such as Hurricane Electric, the proliferation of those services creates a race to sign up Internet exchanges that enable application providers to send traffic directly to any number of end users in a specific geographic region.
As Internet networking services become more critical to the economic vitality of any given region, the number of Internet peering exchanges has been increasing dramatically, especially among providers of commercial Internet peering exchanges that focus on commercial applications.
Leber adds that the rise in mobile, high definition video and Internet of Things (IoT) applications is driving most of the demand all across the globe. In fact, a recent Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2014–2019 report from Cisco forecasts that global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold in 2016 and the two zettabyte threshold in 2019.
Hurricane Electric is betting that most of those new applications will make use of native IPv6 address versus IPv4 address that are becoming increasingly hard to come by. To support that anticipated demand for Internet services, the company has been adding 100G circuits between core routers in it's network in Europe, North America, and Asia.
Correction 6/12: incorrect references to peering agreements have been removed.
