More than 6,000 LACNIC Members

31/01/2017

According to the latest reports prepared by the organization’s Membership Services department, LACNIC welcomed 2017 with more than 6,000 members throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
After the incorporation of more than 1,000 new companies during the past 15 months, in January LACNIC reached 6,094 members in the 32 territories that make up its service region. “This major, double-digit growth of our membership is the result of the work of LACNIC and its community and shows that the region remains optimistic about the strategies to be developed this year,” noted Oscar Robles, LACNIC CEO.
LACNIC members include the world’s leading telecommunications companies and the region’s most influential civil society organizations and universities.
Brazil is the country with the highest number of members (71%), followed by Argentina (9%) and Mexico (4%). Likewise, 2% of these 6,094 members are large ISPs, 81% are small- to medium-sized ISPs, and 16% are end users. There are also nine adhering members and five founding members.
This increase in the number of members coincides with the final phase of IPv4 address exhaustion in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is anticipated to occur in early March. In this sense, Robles stressed that “the policies defined by the LACNIC community over the past 14 years have made it possible to continue assigning address space, even when faced with the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.”
Robles also stressed that the increase in LACNIC’s membership base must be accompanied by IPv6 development, as Internet growth in Latin America and the Caribbean will only be possible with the deployment of the v6 protocol. “We continue to see significant growth of IPv6 deployment in the region’s networks: today, one in three networks can carry IPv6 traffic,” he added.