Hurricane Electric Predicts Exhaustion of IPv4 Address Space will Occur Next Week

Migration to IPv6 is imperative to maintain business continuity

FREMONT, Calif. - Wednesday, January 26th 2011 [ME NewsWire]

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Hurricane Electric, the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and leading colocation provider, today predicted that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) will allocate its final block of IPv4 addresses sometime next week.

The exhaustion of available IPv4 addresses from the IANA means that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) may be unable to fulfill requests for additional IPv4 address blocks from organizations with dwindling reserves of free addresses. IPv4-only organizations denied new addresses may face high capital expenditures to install and configure the networking equipment necessary to work around the lack of addresses.

“In order to avoid costly capital expenditures down the road and possible failure on their business continuity plans, companies must make the migration to IPv6 sooner rather than later,” said Martin Levy, Hurricane Electric’s Director of IPv6 Strategy. “Companies that fail to migrate to IPv6 will face a number of painful options, including buying expensive equipment to cobble together an address-sharing scheme or going out to the marketplace to acquire IP address space at a potentially exorbitant price.”

Hurricane Electric’s global Internet backbone is one of the few that is IPv6-native at each and every customer connection and at each and every location it operates at. First deployed on Hurricane Electric’s Internet backbone in 2001, IPv6 is offered as a core service and every customer is provided IPv6 connectivity. In addition to operating the world’s largest IPv6 network, Hurricane Electric connects to more than 1,100 associated IPv6 networks.

Hurricane Electric offers IPv4 and IPv6 transit solutions over the same connection at speeds of up to 10 Gbps. Within its global network, Hurricane Electric has 45 major exchange points with connectivity to more than 1,600 different networks. Employing a resilient fiber topology, Hurricane Electric leverages four redundant paths crossing North America, two separate paths between the U.S. and Europe, and rings serving Europe and Asia.

In addition to its global Internet backbone and colocation offerings, Hurricane Electric offers popular IPv6 certification, Tunnel Brokerand Free DNS Serviceofferings at no charge. For years, Hurricane Electric has educated network operators, CIOs and C-level executives about the benefits of IPv6 and how to implement the next-generation Internet protocol.

Hurricane Electric also offers an IPv4 exhaustion countdown applicationthat depicts the time left until all IPv4 addresses are depleted. Once the final allocation at the IANA occurs, the application will continue to monitor the five RIRs address space allocations. The RIRs (AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE) each has a finite amount of IPv4 space left for allocations to operators and end users.

About Hurricane Electric

Hurricane Electric is a leading Internet Backbone and colocation Provider. Hurricane Electric operates its global IPv4 and IPv6 network and owns several data centers in Fremont, California, running multiple N-by-10 Gbps links throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Founded by Mike Leber in his garage in 1994, Hurricane Electric now operates the largest IPv6 Internet backbone in the world as measured by the number of networks connected.

For additional information on Hurricane Electric, please visit http://www.he.net.
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