Early 2009, .TEL started out with about 120,000 registrations. In the next year, it grew to a 250,000 and registrations reached their peak in 2011 with about 340,000 registrations. After this, the numbers started to decline rapidly. Currently there are slightly less .TEL names registered then short after the start of the general availability in 2009.

A crippled TLD?

The .TEL was promoted as a platform for publishing contact details online through a dedicated telhosting platform. You might consider it like an online Rolodex. The use of this extension was restricted to this platform. This was of course a limitation …