A total of 1.5 million web addresses with the ending .ch are registered in Switzerland. The country thus has one of the highest levels of coverage with Internet addresses anywhere in the world. SWITCH, the registry for .ch and .li addresses, is welcoming the 1.5 millionth website with a gift.
Switzerland is an Internet nation: almost 75 percent of the population use the web on a daily basis or several times a week (Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2010). Mr. and Mrs. Helvetia also like contributing to the Internet: SWITCH, the Swiss registry for domain names, is celebrating the 1.5 millionth Internet address with the ending .ch. Switzerland’s first three domain names were registered almost 25 years ago already: cern.ch, eth.ch and switch.ch. The number of .ch addresses passed the million mark in 2007. Now, just three and a half years later, 1.5 million addresses have already been registered.
A children’s book crosses the 1.5-million mark
Visitors to www.nicole-eilinger.ch meet buffaloes, Indians and a boy called Luca. This is the website of ethnologist and primary school teacher Nicole Eilinger from Wald, Canton Zurich, who uses it to present and market her children’s book “Luca trifft Fliegende Feder” (Luca meets Flying Feather), which has just been published. As a token of thanks for registering the 1.5 millionth .ch address, SWITCH is giving the author a wellness weekend in Saas Fee. The gift came as a “complete surprise” for Nicole Eilinger, who is particularly pleased about the attention being drawn to her children’s book. The Internet is also a subject that the primary school teacher covers in the classroom. “It’s important for primary school children to know about the risks and opportunities associated with the Internet already. I try to show the children how to use different media in a responsible manner.”  Marco D'Alessandro from SWITCH with Nicole Eilinger, her husband and job partner, her sister and her class celebrating the registration of the the 1.5 millionth .ch address |
.ch amongst the biggest worldwide
Just under 200 million domain names have been registered worldwide, as a current study by VeriSign, the registry for .com and .net addresses has revealed. And the internet is continuing to grow, with the number of registrations increasing by 13 percent each year. A comparison of the different countries shows that the highest number of Internet addresses have been registered by Germany, with .de, followed in second to fifth place by .uk (Great Britain), .cn (China), .nl (Netherlands) and .ru (Russia). Switzerland, with .ch, comes 14th, directly after .us for the USA. With 1.5 million .ch addresses for just under 7.8 million inhabitants, Switzerland has one of the highest densities of internet addresses anywhere in the world.  Continuous growth: number of .ch addresses registered in Switzerland since 1997. |
