NIC Chile (Chile's domain name provider), the only one in Latin America to have it's own domain name extension (.cl), has, in the latest months, played it's best cards.
 |  | | | | | | ©2006 NIC Chile | A couple of months ago, the mirror of the "F root server" (a "clone" of the 13 servers around the world) was successfully installed and launched in Chile. Big achievement, because this mirror server is in charge of managing the domain name requests. In simple words, it converts domain names (www.ohmynews.com, for example) to an IP number the computer can understand and connect.
According to NIC Chile director Patricio Poblete, this server improves the speed of the Internet connections in Latin America, and, if one of the other 13 servers around the world was to fail, the requests would be handled here.
To achieve this, the server was configured in a special way so it could still do its job if it failed, and hardware could be replaced without shutting it down. It is housed (stored) in a data center with the best standards in security and performance and all the main ISP's are connected to it directly.
NIC launched another service in the course of the year, which has been another great achievement in the history of the Internet not only locally, but globally. The IDN domains (Internationalized Domain Names) have special characters, like "ã" or "ñ."
In the first hour of the launching, NIC Chile received about 1,000 requests for new domains, where the average is 180 a day.
One of the advantages of this new technology, is to stimulate the cultural identity of the local communities on the Internet.
One of the disadvantages, is the fact that not all the users around the world possess the new characters on their keyboards, making it more difficult to find those new sites.
Thus, Poblete recommends not to use this new domain name, if the goal of the Web page was to get to the international market. "Nobody is forcing anyone to use these new domain names," he claims. "They're just new options for the user."
Internet Explorer is the only Web browser not capable of accessing these domain names natively; it requires a special plugin from Verisign, the i-Nav TM. An alternative to this add-on is the open source project from IDN-OSS, the EchIDNA.
For testing purposes, NIC Chile has a temporary domain name: www.nandu.cl, with which you can know whether your browser supports IDN or not.
"We hope to have more of the projects we have in mind up and running soon, like the renewed domain registration system, among others," Poblete said.
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