Your .tel is your very own digital profile page. You can store the following information in your .tel and you can see an example at http://telpage.tel.

ICANN has delegated to Telnames Limited, the .tel Sponsoring Organization, the responsibility for developing, implementing and policing certain policies related to the .tel Top Level Domain and its community.

You can submit your views on and objections to the established or revision of standards, policies, procedures, and practices or the manner in which standards, policies, procedures and practices are enforced by contacting Telnames through a number of different channels:

Typically, registrars will allow you to register domain names for up to 10 years.

In order to register a .tel domain name, the name must follow the .tel Acceptable Use Policy for naming. The main policies include:

The WHOIS service enables you retrieve information on.tel domain name holders, although individuals may opt out of WHOIS and hide some of their contact details.

Please consult the Acceptable Use Policy for details on how .tel domains should be used.

You can sell or transfer a .tel domain just as you would with other domain names. Please be notified that according to ICANN regulations, domains can only be transferred to a different registrar after 60 days from the date of registration. After 60 days since the registration date you may contact your registrar to transfer your .tel domain as required. You can only transfer a domain name before it expires.

You can transfer an active .tel domain to a .tel accredited registrar of your choice. Because services may differ, check that your prospective registrar provides the services you may require.

Telnames does not provide refunds for .tel domains to domain holders. Please check whether your registrar has a refund policy.

The .tel domain names are subject to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which establishes a procedure for resolving certain trademark disputes relating to domain names. You can also seek redress in the court. Please get a qualified legal advice to determine the appropriate venue for resolution of your dispute.

Your domain may have been auto-renewed by your provider. Check the “Expiry Date” in the WHOIS. If this is in the future, then your domain has been renewed and it is likely that your provider has already taken payment for this. If the expiry date is in the past, please contact your provider as soon as possible to renew before the name is deleted.

Your domain may still be in the redemption period, during which you as the domain owner may be able to redeem it depending on your provider’s policies and procedures. Domains in redemption will have a “Pending Delete” status in the WHOIS. If this is the case, you should contact your provider to discuss the possibility of redemption. This is likely to incur a premium fee, but your provider will be able to advise fully on this.

If the domain is no longer listed in the WHOIS it is available for general registration and you can purchase it as a new registration.

Even though a domain has passed its expiry date it may still be renewed by the domain owner at any time during the 45-day auto-renewal period, or during the 30-day redemption period following a deletion. Unless a domain is expressly deleted by a registrar, it renews automatically for another year at the end of the 45-day period following its expiration.

If the current owner does not wish to renew the domain, the registrar issues a deletion and changes the WHOIS status to “Pending Delete”. If the owner doesn’t request restoration of the domain within 30 days of this redemption period, the domain is kept in a 5-day deletion period, and then released for re-registration. In summation, a domain name may be released for anyone to register in a period between 35 and 80 days after its expiration.

The domain name market has evolved substantially since the early days of the internet and .tel is evolving with it. As the market for domains has grown, it has become clear that not all domain names are created equal. Just as with real estate or stocks, when value and demand for domain names is high, the market must adjust. To ensure for the fair and efficient allocation of .tel domain names, a tiered pricing model ensures that .tel domain names are priced in a manner that best reflects their true value. Value tiers are based on a variety of attributes, including thousands of historic and comparable sales, current market trends and keyword values, among other things.

Even if you paid a premium value price to register your .tel domain name, your renewal rate will be the standard.tel renewal fee charged for all .tel domain names. Please check with your preferred retailer for details, as fees may differ.

Registering a premium .tel domain name is exactly like registering any standard domain name from your preferred domain retailer. Simply visit one of a growing list of retailers, type in the name you’re interested in, put it in your cart and pay for it. It’s as easy as that.

To reset your Telhosting account password, go to www.managemy.tel and click on the “Forgotten your password” link then enter the email address associated with the account and you will receive a temporary password that can be used just once. When you log in using the temporary password, please ensure that you reset your password to something memorable. Your password can be reset from the settings section of the control panel.

Often accounts contain more than one .tel domain. If you do not see a domain you own in the dropdown list in your control panel, please contact us at cservice@telnic.org

Once you save your contact, it gets published to the DNS and is instantly available in your .tel. Type in your .tel name in a new browser window to see how others see your page.

The Location record is a combination of longitude and latitude displayed as a map entry. If you want to publish a postal address, use the address fields in the control panel

If you have opted to disable a contact, it will be displayed in grey.

Yes, .tel domains support mailboxes. An email package may be offered by your .tel service provider or configured via the Settings tab in your .tel control panel. You cannot host email services on a .tel domain, but you can use a mail hosting provider and add relevant domain settings to the provider’s servers.

To request access to the .tel zone file, please visit https://czds.icann.org

It depends. Please email cservice@telnic.org to find out what resources are available for resellers.

IDN policies are a product of a collaborative work of technical, legal and linguistic experts. Telnames believes that the best avenue for developing IDN policies for a given language is through the countries and communities that use that language. The reasoning for Telnames choice of languages is therefore based on how close a given country or community is to a consensus in regards to what rules must govern their local language IDNs.

IDN policy development is an ongoing process. Telnames will be considering the introduction of new IDN languages based on the results of the discussions within the respective communities.

Generally, all characters that are used in the language an IDN is associated with are allowed. For more details, please refer to the policy document for the corresponding IDN language. IDN policies are published on Telnames web site at policies. Each of the policies contains a character table that lists all the characters allowed for an IDN in a given language.

Any characters that are not included in the character table for a given language, are not allowed. For example, one cannot register münchén.tel as a German language IDN, because letter “é” is not part of the German language character table.

IDN.tel domain names can be registered through a sub-set of our ICANN-accredited Registrar partners. A list of those selling .tel domains and IDNs will be found at get your tel. Those that support IDN.tel domain name registrations will be marked with an asterisk.

Apart from the restrictions on the types of characters that can be registered and the languages supported, there are no further restrictions on the registration of IDN.tel domain names and 1 and 2 character IDNs are available.

Yes, if it is available and conforms to the character sets and language tables available.

Exact retail pricing is decided by our participating registrars, and so varies from company to company. Generally, however, Internationalised .tel domains do not cost any more than regular .tel domain names.

Yes, for IDNs associated with Chinese, Japanese and Russian languages .tel employs a variant blocking mechanism so domain names in different scripts that look confusingly similar cannot be registered. For example, if the domain name pear.tel is registered, реаг.tel (all these characters are Cyrillic) will not be available for registration. Please see the IDN Policies for more details.

A “decorated” character domain is one which has one or more characters that has linguistic “ornaments”. An example of a “decorated” domain is björn.tel, as opposed to bjorn.tel, which has no “decorated” characters.

All IDN.tel domains will be first-come, first served. There is no automatic right to gain a “decorated” character domain.

With one specific exception, every .tel domain name (in its ASCII-Compatible Encoded form) is treated independently. Each domain name is handled on a “first-come, first-served” basis. This is a continuation of the current .tel policy. That exception deals with Chinese Internationalised Domain Names, where Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters are considered to be “the same”. In that specific case, Telnames ensures that when a Chinese IDN is registered, the domain name that consists entirely of Simplified Chinese characters and the domain name that consists entirely of Traditional Chinese characters is managed together with the requested domain; these are treated as one unit. The ownership of a domain name does not give any automatic rights to register any other domain name. Thus ownership of shop.tel does not give any rights to ashop.tel or theshop.tel. This is also true for names that have different spellings, so that Smith is different from Smithe. In order not to act arbitrarily, Telnames processes names on a purely deterministic basis. This is done with commonly defined rules, not ones that have been invented in an “ad hoc” manner. Telnames will not make arbitrary and subjective decisions on what names people can use, so it simply treats each name as being different.

Possible Rules for Assignment of International Domain Names (IDNs) is not a simple subject.

Since general availability of .tel domains, Telnames has not made decisions on the comparability or otherwise of domain names. With the introduction of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), the situation becomes more complex. Within a language, some words have forms with and without “ornamented” characters, and there are a number of different rules to map from one name form to another. Unfortunately, these rules conflict. That means that there is no single deterministic scheme that will work for any word.

Many words have crept into usage in other languages, and those words differ in the way they apply diacriticals, or even whether there are diacriticals in the different language versions. Some languages drop the “ornamentation” for some capital letters. Other languages do use these ornamented capital letters. Thus is may not be clear whether or not two domain requests that have been converted to lower case are the same. Thus transliteration between the “ornamented” and plain versions of a character might need to be considered.

Here are just a few of the rules that might apply:

But then…

As an example, should Noel (a first name, a town in Missouri, a hurricane, a company in Columbia, and a poetical English word for Christmas) be associated with the string Nöl (using German rules), or with Nöel (Christmas in French and other languages)? Conversely, is Nöl associated with Noel, or with Nol? Also, should Nöel be associated with Noeel (again applying German language rules)?

Thus, if noel.tel is registered, should Telnames block an attempt to register nöl.tel? Conversely, if someone registers nöl.tel, will Telnames then have to block a subsequent attempt to register the domain noel.tel? Also, what of the domain name nol.tel – should this also be blocked? Finally, if nol.tel has already been registered, does this mean that nöl and nöel are not available?

Trying to apply these conflicting rules to block registration attempts for “associated” words would raise many questions and the confusion that would bring would not help anyone. Without checking every name in advance against dictionaries for each language, it is not possible to come to single, unambiguous, clear and fair answer. As the result would still be subjective, Telnames continues to treat each domain name as a separate item, and allocates names on a first-come, first-served basis. After much research, Telnames has concluded that this is the most equitable solution for all community members.

Telnames does not make any judgemental on whether or not there is any prior right to a name. That remains a task for WIPO or other approved arbitrators. If an organisation believes that it has right to a domain for which it has not applied or secured, it can use the UDRP, the decisions of which Telnames of course respects.