Founded in 2000, Telnic Limited is the UK-based Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organization for the communications-focused .tel sponsored top level domain (sTLD), which launched in March 2009 and which has over 300,000 .tel names registered. In 2009, it won a UK IT Industry Award as well as an InfoCommerce Group Models of Excellence Award and Gartner named Telnic a Cool Vendor 2011 in Context-Aware Computing. Telnic’s backend registry services are provided by NeuStar.