There’s a new Web domain in town, and its ambition isn’t simply to sign up as many users as it can – it’s hoping to replace phone numbers. Some say “.tel” could change the way businesses handle corporate communication. But not everyone is convinced.
I was talking to an exec at a large registrar a few months ago, and we agreed that it was hard to see much value in .TEL. You pay more money to get more spam. If there were a lot of companies using a lot of different VoIP systems, and it were important to be able to connect to them directly, something like .TEL might be viable. But the reality is that the number of systems that people actually use is small, and everyone who cares about being reachable by voice has a regular phone number, since they're so cheap. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.