Bhutan was one of the last countries in the world to connect to Internet back in June 1999 by DrukNet, ISP under Bhutan Telecom. Being the leading ISP and the only one with national coverage, and to address IPv4 depletion, we took the country's IPv4-to-IPv6 transition as one primary responsibility while we endeavour to promote ICT growth and development in our effort to play catalytic roles contributing to country's socio-economic development. The manageable networks size and challenges of being a small country are additional motivation for our objective: TOWARDS WORLD’S FIRST IPv6 READY COUNTRY.
Our scope covers IPv4-IPv6 dual-stack connectivity implementation, extension to server(s) and two Internet services – web and mail. We trained Bhutan's most Network/System administrators - customers, ISPs and their customers to successfully deploy IPv6 in their infrastructure. Having allocated IPv6 addresses, the Project Team faced a challenge: the need to implement IPv6 in all networks instead of only overseeing and assisting the needed, as originally planned. We were unexpectedly faced with the complexities of having to reconfigure and optimize networks and systems.
As of this report, we have been able to deploy IPv6 in 3 customers' networks and core infrastructure. We remain optimistic on our objective as we continue implementing past the project’s deadline (June 2011).DrukNet is extremely proud to take Bhutan's IPv4-to-IPv6 transition as one of our primary responsibilities as the leading ISP in the country with national coverage. Had it not been us, it is unlikely any other organization will do so, at least for now when the time is most apt as demanded by the situation of IPv4 exhaustion. For the project team and the technical professionals in particular, this project is providing one great opportunity to learn the newest and the coolest Internet protocol, IPv6. For professionals like the team members, all our efforts and resources put in are worthy contribution to the society. At such time today when we are nearing IPv4 depletion, there is no project more valuable and important than working to take Bhutan on IPv6. The funding as been sufficient enough thus far to cover all the activities completed. Had there been no funding, we probably would not be thinking transition to IPv6 yet.
The project team, DrukNet and Bhutan Telecom truly hope this project will go a long way to promote ICT growth and development in our effort to play catalytic roles contributing to country's socio-economic development which we hope will ultimately help Bhutan graduate out of Least Developed Countries in the world.
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Full report in PDF for download at
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