As a ground rule, SURFnet treats IPv6 on the network level equal to IPv4, as much as possible. This implies that procedures between SURFnet’s NOC and SURFnet Network Services are streamlined to support this. Also, the external peering policy towards other non-European NRENs such as Abilene and CA*net 4 and towards the commodity Internet through SURFnet’s upstream providers and through peerings at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) is the same for IPv4 and IPv6. At the AMS-IX it means that IPv6 peering requests are handled exactly like IPv4 peering requests, as SURFnet’s peering policy on the Exchange is identical for both protocols. In December 2004, SURFnet had approx. 65 IPv6 peering sessions enabled over the AMS-IX.

While SURFnet strives to be able to perform network management over IPv6 as well, today this is done only partly at this moment. SURFnet monitors the availability of the IPv6 customer connections as well as external connections. Also where software allows it (like SSH, Nagios and Rancid) IPv6 is used to manage the router equipment in SURFnet5.