The Carphone Warehouse is looking to corner ten per cent of the UK's fixed line market within the next three years as it continues to challenge BT's dominance of the sector.

TalkTalk UK - Carphone's fixed line subsidiary - now has more than 920,000 users after the company recorded what it described as an "outstanding year". And with revenues of £123.6m, the business has made a profit in only its second year of operation even taking into account heavy investment and marketing costs.

Such optimism has led execs to set a target of signing up two million residential punters by March 2008 - equivalent to one in ten of the UK's fixed line market.

Carphone also plans to make it easier for punters to pay their call charges and line rental on a single bill, thus "terminating the billing relationship with BT".

Details of TalkTalk's performance were outlined today as Carphone - the European mobile phone retailer that has branched out into other areas of telecoms - published its prelims for the 53 weeks to the beginning of April.

Turnover was up 27.4 per cent to £2.36bn while pre-tax profit climbed a third to £102m.

Said chief exec Charles Dunstone: "We are now well on the way to developing a broad-based telecoms group, providing mobile and fixed line services to individuals and businesses across ten countries.

"We have now proved that TalkTalk has all the ingredients to become the major alternative force in UK residential communications, and further regulatory change over the next year should allow us to move to the next level in both scale and range of services." ®

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