IPv6 initiatives within the European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)

We present an overview of the IPv6 activities of European National Research and Education Networks, both within the individual national programmes and in joint studies undertaken within the GEANT Task Force for Next Generation Networks working group. The group has an international testbed activity (GTPv6) under which many IPv6 aspects have been studied, including routing, interoperability, DNS, multicast, registries and addressing, firewalls, transition and IPv6 applications. We present a summary of initiatives, including the m6bone multicast IPv6 network, a successful attempt at the IPv6 Land Speed Record, and the migration of two NRENs - SURFnet and Funet - to dual-stack IPv6 operation.