The company's systems have been fully developed and moved to the Connect Internet Centre in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond, with backups in Sydney and at a Verio data centre in the US, according to managing director Adrian Kinderis.
Provisionally accredited registrars have begun to connect to the system for their own testing purposes, he added.
Chris Disspain, CEO of auDA, said acceptance testing of the registry has already started and he expects the new registry will go live within two weeks of completion as long as enough registrars are also ready to allow a competitive market.
"We expect [two-year charges for .com.au domain names] around AU$80," said Disspain, although "registrars will charge whatever they charge, whatever the market will bear," he added. Melbourne IT, the current registry and registrar, charges AU$140.
For two-year domain registrations, registrars will pay AusRegistry AU$50 for .com.au and .net.au names, AU$32 for .asn.au, AU$25 for .id.au, and AU$11 for .org.au. In each case, AU$11 is remitted to auDA, so AusRegistry is effectively providing its services at no charge for the .org.au domain, which is reserved for charities and non-profit organisations.
Kinderis explained that some registrars are expected to offer domain name registrations as part of a bundle of services such as Web hosting, while others will simply handle the registration. Consequently, resellers are likely to align themselves with more than one registrar in order to provide alternatives to suit different customers.
AusRegistry intends "putting personality into each of the namespaces and segmenting the market," Kinderis added.
One aspect of this plan is to encourage the use of the .net.au domain by telcos, ISPs and other companies offering IT or "tech" products or services.
auDA's new policy for .com.au and .net.au allows companies to register names with a "close and substantial connection" with the business, allowing much wider scope. An example cited by AusRegistry is that a telecommunications company could seek to register mobilephones.net.au.
