Introducing 6rd at Swiss ISP Sunrise Communications AG

Reporting on what is needed to introduce 6rd on a large scale in a provider environment, both from project management perspective as well as on technical level.

In 2017 and 2018 Sunrise started two projects to accommodate the constant growth of residential internet customers and to introduce IPv6 access for customers: Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) and IPv6 rapid deployment (6rd).

In the first part of our presentation we will focus on project management related topics. We describe the project motivation and scope, the scoping process, the project organization, timeline and project management related challenges during execution.

In the second part we present the technical solution for the 6rd implementation. We will start with the provisioning flow and outline which changes were required to push 6rd related configuration to the CPEs of the customers. We then describe the network implementation in the Sunrise backbone network, including implications of the 6rd solution on legal interception topics. We also describe the inter-working of 6rd and CGN. Before we conclude with challenges and lessons learned we share information about the current customer base, IPv6 traffic portion etc.