Hurricane Electric
More info
- Creator
- Mike Leber
- Released
- 1994
- Type
- Internet service provider
Fremont-based ISP that built one of the best-connected backbones on the internet by peering with almost anyone who asks.
Founded by Mike Leber in 1994. Hurricane Electric (AS6939) runs an open peering policy: if you are at the same internet exchange, it will usually interconnect for free. That has given it more direct neighbours than almost any other network, especially over IPv6, where HE has long been the most connected network of all.
Plenty of network engineers first touched IPv6 through HE's free tunnelbroker.net, which since 2001 has tunnelled IPv6 over IPv4 for anyone whose ISP had not got round to it. There is also bgp.he.net, a looking glass and BGP lookup tool that has become the default way to find out who announces what. HE's refusal to pay for peering has led to long disputes in which chunks of the IPv6 internet could not reach each other.