Enter Ethiopia market with a .ET Domain

No. Ethio telecom's end-user contract opens the service to customers who can form legally binding contracts under Ethiopian law and sets a minimum age of eighteen; residency, nationality and a locally incorporated company appear nowhere in the text. Priority is purely chronological: valid requests for the same name are handled in the order they reach the registry system, so there is no reservation procedure and no waiting list. Measurement backs this up, since names in the zone are held from abroad. The registry does keep the right to verify your identity with documents.

The registry's knowledge base gives the limit as a minimum of one and a maximum of 63 characters, but practice is far narrower. The entire single-character space, all 26 letters and 10 digits, was registered years ago and not one of them is free today. Every two-character label is held back by the registry: queried directly they show up as neither registered nor available, returning a separate restricted-class answer instead. That is why the shortest .et names you can actually buy are three characters long. If you want something short, start your search at three characters.

From one year up to ten. Ethio telecom publishes the advance-payment periods from one to ten years as a table on its service page; the minimum plan runs for one year and renews annually unless a longer period has been paid for. The registry's own records confirm it: the zone holds registrations that expire ten years out and have never been renewed, which means the long term was chosen at the first order. Responsibility for renewing sits explicitly with the holder, and auto-renewal applies only if you pay in advance and request it.

You get ninety days. The registry's knowledge base states that it begins sending notifications forty-five days before the expiry date and then holds the registered name for ninety days after expiry so that you can still renew it; at the end of that period the name goes back to the registry service and is scheduled for release to the public. The contract puts the same chain more bluntly: unpaid service is suspended for ninety days, after which Ethio telecom may delete the name or transfer it to another customer. No grace-plus-redemption chain is published here.

Both are zones of the same registry under the same contract; the difference is eligibility class and level. .et is registered directly at the second level and asks the applicant for no capacity at all. .com.et is classified in the contract for commercial entities, and the text gives the registry the right to act against a registration that does not fit its class. They also differ technically: com.et is an independent, separately signed zone beneath .et, and sharing the same name servers does not change that. Taking both is a direct way to close your name in the Ethiopian market.

Yes, in full. The registry's whois server applies none of the blanket masking familiar from Europe: the registrant, admin and tech blocks are printed with name, organisation, street, city, postal code, country, telephone, fax and email. Measurement found personal email addresses and mobile numbers of private individuals published openly. The practical consequence is simple: the contact details you give at registration can be harvested for spam and phishing, so a dedicated mailbox is the sensible choice. You can see how your own record looks on the whois search page.

There are two separate operations and they are easily confused. Changing provider is expressly allowed by the contract: customers may move their domain from any registrar to the Ethio telecom system and the other way round. Whether a record is locked is the holder's own choice; the zone contains both open records and records carrying a transfer lock, and lifting the lock happens at your request. A change of holder is a different regime and needs the registry's prior written consent, since an unauthorised assignment counts as grounds for termination. Start on the domain transfer page.

Today, Ethio telecom. The IANA root zone record names Ethiopia's state-owned telecom operator as the .et manager, and the administrative and technical contacts sit with that company as well. The role is changing hands, though: according to the announcement of AfTLD, the African top-level domain organisation, dated 11 March 2025, a delegation of the Ethiopian Communications Authority is overseeing the transfer of the country code extension from Ethio telecom to the regulator. The root zone record does not yet reflect that transfer. The registry software comes from a separate supplier; the legal registry is national.