Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The Internet operates by transferring data between hosts in small packets that are independently routed across networks as specified by an international communications protocol known as the Internet Protocol. (Wikipedia).

Lately, DrukNet had some trouble with its network connectivity. The connections became unreliable and clients complained of poor internet connectivity. While the DrukNet did not officially announced about switch over to new IP structure, IPv6 from IPv4, I noticed that its addresses changed. When I pinged previously, I got the following results, which is IPv4 response of www.druknet.bt :

But after some time, when i pinged www.druknet.bt, I noticed the change in the response IP address from DrukNet server:

On February 3, 2011, in a ceremony in Miami, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned the last batch of 5 /8 address blocks to the Regional Internet Registries.,^[9] officially depleting the global pool of completely fresh blocks of addresses.^[10] Each of the address blocks represents approximately 16.7 million possible addresses, or over 80 million combined potential addresses.

These addresses could well be fully consumed within three to six months of that time at current rates of allocation.^[11] APNIC was the first RIR to exhaust its regional pool on 15 April 2011, except for a small amount of address space reserved for the transition to IPv6, which will be allocated in a much more restricted way.^[12]

In 2003, the director of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), Paul Wilson, stated that, based on then-current rates of deployment, the available space would last for one or two decades.^[13] In September 2005, a report by Cisco Systems suggested that the pool of available addresses would exhaust in as little as 4 to 5 years.^[14] In 2008, a policy process started for the end-game and post-exhaustion era.^[15] In 2010, a daily updated report projected the global address pool exhaustion by the first quarter of 2011, and depletion at the five regional Internet registries before the end of 2011.^[16] (Wikipedia)

The most important feature of IPv6 is a much larger address space than in IPv4. The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4.^[1] The address space therefore supports 2¹²⁸ or approximately 3.4×10³⁸ addresses. By comparison, this amounts to approximately 4.8×10²⁸ addresses for each of the seven billion people alive in 2011.^[18] In addition, the IPv4 address space is poorly allocated, with approximately 14% of all available addresses utilized.^[19] While these numbers are large, it was not the intent of the designers of the IPv6 address space to assure geographical saturation with usable addresses. Rather, the longer addresses simplify allocation of addresses, enable efficient route aggregation, and allow implementation of special addressing features. In IPv4, complex Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) methods were developed to make the best use of the small address space. The standard size of a subnet in IPv6 is 2⁶⁴ addresses, the square of the size of the entire IPv4 address space. Thus, actual address space utilization rates will be small in IPv6, but network management and routing efficiency is improved by the large subnet space and hierarchical route aggregation.

I hope switching over to IPv6 infrastructure in DrukNet will greatly enhance the allocation of IP addresses. This will also enable future expansion without worries of limitation as posed earlier by IPv4 addresses.