Today, the vast majority of SURFnet’s customer connections are at 1 Gbit/s using Ethernet technology. Three customers are connected at 10GE, connected to line cards in the backbone that do not support IPv6 at wire speed. In SURFnet6, the number of connected organizations using 10GE is expected to rapidly increase. Wire speed 10 Gbit/s IPv6 will be one of the features implemented in SURFnet6.

SURFnet5 supports customer connections on IPv4 as well as IPv6. For IPv4 unicast and multicast are supported, while for IPv6 this is currently unicast only. IPv6 can be delivered towards SURFnet’s 180 customers in the field of research and higher education using either a native or tunnelled approach.

Native IPv6 connections are implemented either “dual stack” or “on a dedicated port”. Dual stack implies that the customer connection runs IPv4 as well as IPv6 on the same local loop. A few customers, however, prefer IPv6 on a dedicated port, next to their IPv4 port for the simple reason that they have a dedicated router for IPv6 on their LAN.

Tunnelled connections to customers are only allowed in case the customer is not able to implement IPv6 in dual stack mode or on a dedicated port. In case we implement a tunnel connection with a customer, we always ask the customer to make plans for going native.