Although the concept of circles and spheres can be extended to hyperbolic space, finding the densest packing becomes much more difficult. In a hyperbolic space there is no limit to the number of spheres that can surround another sphere (for example, Ford circles can be thought of as an arrangement of identical hyperbolic circles in which each circle is surrounded by an infinite number of other circles). The concept of average density also becomes much more difficult to define accurately. The densest packings in any hyperbolic space are almost always irregular.
Despite this difficulty, K. Böröczky gives a universal upper bound for the density of sphere packings of hyperbolic n-space where n ≥ 2. In three dimensions the Böröczky bound is approximately 85.327613%, and is realized by the horosphere packing of the order-6 tetrahedral honeycomb with Schläfli symbol {3,3,6}. In addition to this configuration at least three other horosphere packings are known to exist in hyperbolic 3-space that realize the density upper bound.