Over the last nine months, Cable & Wireless has rolled out native IPv6 across the whole of the AS1273 backbone. Today, several large customers are using this service.

This presentation covers the basic design, the practical experience gained during this rollout, as well as the challenges that needed to be overcome. It provides a collection of useful tips to anyone wanting to roll out production quality native IPv6 services on a global backbone.

The rollout also brought to light several issues with the present ad hoc deployment of v6 by the Internet Community at large, and, despite the protocol's age/maturity, the general lack of vendor support.

This presentation is therefore also a plea directed at vendors and the Internet community alike to clean up its IPv6 story and support its use in production environments.

About the Presenter
Udo Steinegger has been working in the Cable & Wireless IP Engineering Group since 2000. He is responsible for designing C&W's public IP network and portions of C&W's MPLS VPN network. Udo's interests focus on MPLS-based technologies (L2/L3 VPNs, carrier-to-carrier interconnections, QoS, etc.), IPv6, and extending/operating C&W's IXP (INXS).