Following the successful Sunrise and Landrush periods, Telnic, the registry operator for .tel top level domains, announced the general availability of .tel domains for all businesses.

The service has already gone alive with thousands of domain names snapped up by companies and individuals during the sunrise period. Presently, the owners can publish and manage their contact details on a .tel domain, that afterwards can be accessed via any Internet-connected device.

Until now, a number of high profile companies such as the tech giants Google and Microsoft, media companies like CNN and BBC, and the celebrities JK Rowling and Kate Moss have already registered their .tel domain names paying a premium. From now on, .tel domains will be available at reduced prices of between $10 and $25 a year.

Big companies that failed to secure their .tel domains during the Sunrise period, could find them taken by other companies similar in name. That has already happened to the Chinese search engine Baidu, whose domain baidu.com attracts more than 5.5 million visitors annually, but the domain Baidu.tel directs searchers to a Groningen-based Internet services company Baidu, which has actually managed to get the name first.

Mobilephone.tel, books.tel, computer.tel and many other popular generic terms names are already taken. As it could be expected, domains like toys.tel and shoes.tel, to name a few, have been bought up by clever entrepreneurs aiming to make easy money. If you type in your browser “toys.tel”, you will encounter the following note: "This domain is available for lease". Telnic says that keyword sales are fair because corporations and trademark holders had the chance to buy them first.

The UK-based Telnic announced partnerships with MySpace, British Telecom (BT), and a German directory provider with approximately 8 million customers, to sell .tel domains to their users. Their support could result in millions of new .tel domain registrations. Telnic will receive part of the profits from the .tel domain names sold by its partners.

Telnic has also introduced a free iPhone application, that will enable .tel owners to edit and publish information on the Web under their own domains without the need of special web design skills, software or even a PC.

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