.Tel domain names get IDNs in June.
Coming soon: Jörn.tel, Júlia.tel, and Bjørn.tel.
.Tel registry Telnic is launching registration of .tel Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in 16 languages on June 15. IDNs will be available in Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
The company plans to launch more IDNs as other languages are approved for IDNs when there is sufficient demand.
Telnic requested permission from ICANN to offer IDNs back in December, and the request was approved in January.
.Tel IDNs will be offered by many of the same domain name registrars that currently offer .tel. Registration costs are expected to be similar to existing .tel registrations. Although registrants can pick their language for the second level, the top level domain will remain the Latin-character “.tel”.
As of the end of 2009, .tel had approximately 275,000 domain names registered.
so people can waste their money in other languages? lol
It’d be interesting to release the annual registration numbers as it will show thousands of domains dropping. Out of a dozen tel domains I renewed one.
Still available to reg: phlebotomist.tel for that special phlebotomist in your life.
Dave, is 100% correct