UK domain name registry Nominet has won the race to be the country’s registry for Enum, a new standard designed to allow seamless communication between voice-over-IP (VoIP) servers.

The suite of protocols converges PSTN and IP networks by converting a phone number into a domain name and registering it on the DNS, thus allowing a phone number to also be a VoIP address, according to Nominet’s IT director, Jay Daley. Enum will allow firms to benefit from the cost savings associated with VoIP without the need to sign up with a third-party provider such as Skype, he added.

“I liken it to the internet before and after the world wide web ­ things will never be the same once convergence hits in its biggest form,” argued Daley at a Nominet registrar conference this week.

Enum is already used in the US and Germany. Nominet expects the UK version to go live early next year.

Also at the event, Nominet chief executive Lesley Cowley predicted the number of .uk names will grow to around 10 million in the coming year. But one web expert predicted that the value of domain names could soon be diminished.

“The expansion of domain names may become irrelevant because Google increasingly owns the desktop,” said internet consultant Jarrod Robinson. “Often those people that search don’t know the domain name they’ve gone to.”