CZ.NIC association, the administrator of the national domain CZ, today at 2:00 PM transferred the ENUM system to the full commercial operation. The Czech Republic has thus become one of the few leading countries of the world that are running the ENUM system on the commercial level. Telecommunication operators, companies as well as home users may now take full advantage of all benefits offered by the internet telephony.

The ENUM system has been operational in the Czech Republic since 20 September 2006, with 2,100 ENUM domain names registered by users within the testing operation, representing over 535,000 phone numbers. In Europe, the ENUM system is currently used also by Austria, Germany, Poland, Finland, Romania and Switzerland; testing is in progress in several other countries, too. The national ENUM domain is delegated in virtually all European countries.

"Our registration system worked efficiently within the testing operation and we have not experienced any issues," said Ondřej Filip, Director of the CZ.NIC association. "The purpose of the testing operation was to verify functionality of the registration system for ENUM domains and fine-tune the registration process. All our expectations have been met, meaning that we can now move on to the full commercial operation of the ENUM system as planned."

During the testing operation, the rules for registering ENUM domain names have been completed and made more accurate, the register infrastructure has been improved to ensure higher availability and reliability and the ENUM domain registrar change process has been simplified.

ENUM and Telecommunication Operators
The critical factor for further development of the ENUM system is its adoption by communication operators. As a minimum, the telecommunication operators should set their exchanges to make queries in the database for ENUM domains belonging to numbers being called. The first Czech telecommunication operator utilizing the ENUM system is, from the beginning of 2007, IPEX – a company that also registered ENUM domain for all its customers.

"Support for the ENUM system by the telecommunication operators can become the key advantage of these operators in the highly competitive environment," added Pavel Tůma. "It is also very easy to start routing calls with the ENUM system, while there mostly no significant costs needed for adjustments of exchanges or other systems."

ENUM Domain Registration Price
ENUM domain registration was free within the testing operation. The current wholesale price for one-year registration of an ENUM domain is 1 CZK excluding VAT. ENUM domains are registered by 9 registrars in the Czech Republic; their list is available at http://enum.nic.cz.

About the ENUM System
The ENUM system takes advantage of both the classic and IP telephony, enabling users of fixed as well as mobile phone numbers to register special ENUM domains for these numbers, containing directions needed to reach these numbers over the Internet. Numbers with matching ENUM domains can then be called over the Internet for free, no matter in which provider's network the given number is located (including foreign networks). The ENUM system is already operational in several neighboring countries (e.g. Germany and Austria). In the Czech Republic, the task to implement and maintain the ENUM system has been assigned by the Ministry of Informatics to the CZ.NIC association. To learn more about the ENUM system, visit http://enum.nic.cz.