6bone is the name of an IPv6 backbone setup in 1996 by the Internet Engineering Task Force for testing. It uses Tunneling protocol to connect IPv6 installations, mostly run by universities and firms.

The 6bone uses a dedicated address space reserved for testing, 3FFE::/16. At its peak in mid-2003, over 150 network prefixes were routed.

The 3ffe::/16 network is deprecated since 2004 and is being replaced by the production network, 2001::/16. As of mid-2005, the 6bone is down to a bit over a hundred prefixes while the production network has over 700. The 6bone network will be finally shut down on June 6, 2006. After this date, nothing in the 6bone prefix will be routed on the Internet.

=Related RFCs=