Upperlink Accredited By ICANN as Registrar

The country’s internet density received a boost as the global internet body, Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN] announced the accreditation of Nigeria’s leading registrar, Upperlink.

This makes the company first Nigerian and eighth accredited registrar in Africa.

Under the new status, Upperlink would serve Nigerian and international markets.

Upperlink’s core areas are in internet and mobile applications, software development and deployment, database management, systems integration and cloud solutions.

As the leading Nigeria Internet Registration Association [NIRA]’s registrar, Upperlink is in the forefront of registrars spearheading the migration of Nigerian companies from .com to the .ng domain name, which is Nigeria's Country Code Top Level Domain, which is the second level extension.

Mr Segun Akano, managing director/CEO of the company, said the .ng domain “is a shorter and unique domain”.

As ICANN registrar, Upperlink would offer Nigerians opportunities to register any domain name extension such as .com, .org, .net etc at affordable prices locally.

Upperlink’s accreditation follows a similar exercise that was achieved in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.

Upperlink has a robust domain registration platform developed in accordance with ICANN's standards with complimentary domain services such as hosting, IPv6 accessibility, trademark validation and an excellent support service.

As an added value, Upperlink offers alternative payment methods and a user-friendly API connection for domain registration.

As a non-profit organization that coordinates the Internet’s global domain name system, ICANN has introduced competition in the registrar marketplace, which has produced over 890 accredited registrars that are offering a range of registration services.

Akano said with the accreditation, Upperlink “will serve Nigeria and all African countries for any purposes related to Domain Names business”.

ICANN is responsible for the coordination of maintenance and methodology of several databases of unique identifiers related to the namespaces of the Internet, and ensuring the network's stable and secure operation.

The numbering facilities include the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6) and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries.

ICANN maintains registries of Internet protocol identifiers, and the management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone), which includes the operation of root name servers.

Much of its work has concerned the DNS policy development for internationalization of the DNS system and introduction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs).