In 2000, Wanadoo took over the major British ISP Freeserve, which had previously been part of the Dixons Group. Following the buy-out, Freeserve maintained its own branding for a while before finally changing to the Wanadoo name on April 28, 2004.
Currently the Wanadoo Group is the largest ISP in Europe (counting the subscribers of TP) with over ten million subscribers, largely concentrated in France, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland.
Wanadoo SA (the holding company for all Wanadoo entities) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of France Telecom SA, having bought up minority interests in late 2004. France Telecom also owns Orange SA, one of Europe's largest mobile operators.
Despite what Freeserve say, Windows, their CD and Internet Explorer are not required.
Freeserve is a genuinely free ISP set up by Dixons.
The Freeserve documentation says that this should be achieved by each user logging on to the POP server with the userid prefixed by "name@" - for instance, if I was user "chef" at "kenny.freeserve.co.uk" I would log on to the POP server as "chef@kenny.freeserve.co.uk".
At the close of regular trading, Freeserve was down $9.81, or 17 percent, to $49.19 after slipping as low as $47.
Freeserve, which had a market cap of $6.8 billion prior to its announcement, was expected to fetch $10 billion from T-Online, Misek said.
Freeserve receives about 50 percent of its revenues from these per-minute charges, a ratio that is expected to decline as customers move to flat-rate pricing.
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