Freeserve nears 70k BB punters

Wanadoo advances

By Tim Richardson, 28th April 2003

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Freeserve chalked up an extra 19,000 broadband customers in the first three months of the year bringing its total to 68,000 punters in the UK.

That might not seem a lot for the outfit that calls itself the UK's number one ISP, but Freeserve insists that the growth rate is in line with increases elsewhere in the UK's broadband market.

And it's not bad either since Freeserve isn't spending large wads of cash to obtain new punters.

Overall, the total number of Freeserve customers rose by 92,000 from 2.57m at the end of December 2002 to 2.67m at the end of March.

Importantly for the ISP, Freeserve managed to increase the number of dial-up subscribers by around 100,000 bringing the total number of paying narrowband punters to a smidge over a million.

Today's figures were released as its parent company - Wanadoo - reported that revenues for Q1 2003 rose 38 per cent to €567m euros from €410m in the corresponding period last year.

Much of this growth came from the growth in broadband subscriptions across Wanadoo's operations in Europe. At the end of March it had 1.6 million broadband punters, an increase which helped its Net access revenues jump 61 per cent from €221m in Q1 2002, to € 355m in Q1 2003.

Wanadoo says these results put it on track to hit growth of between 25-30 per cent for 2003.

In a statement Wanadoo chairman and CEO, Olivier Sichel, said: "This first quarter confirms the dynamic performance of Wanadoo's businesses, in
particular broadband Internet access, where we now have over 1.6 million customers across Europe."

In all, Wanadoo had 8.79m Net access punters in Europe. ®