Broadband Phone Net

Wanadoo have always strived to be at the front of the UK’s broadband industry. They were one of the first ISP’s to provide unlimited dialup, the first ISP to provide 1mb broadband at under £20 a month and this summer are trialling a method to provide broadband without having to own a BT phone line in a technique called Local Loop Unbundling.



Wanadoo in the UK started in 2001 when the French company took over the already popular Freeserve. Freeserve was created by the Dixon’s Group in 1998, back in the days of a 56kbps pay per minute dialup connection. Even back then they were the cheapest ISP around.



If Wanadoo’s large investment in LLU proves successful, BT stand to lose a lot of their customers. LLU will provide a decent alternative to BT’s standard ADSL at a much cheaper price. Costs to implement LLU have dropped significantly in the UK to a stage where many ISPs are seeing it as the way forward, although it is already used by a small number of ISPs, Wanadoo will be the first to bring it to the mass market. LLU would allow users cheaper or, more likely, faster internet, allowing users better services such as live video on demand and internet telephony.



Being the thorn in BT’s side for some time now, Wanadoo have constantly been upgrading their existing network. Recently they doubled their standard 1mbps package to 2mbps, with BT mirroring the change to avoid losing customers. Both BT and Wanadoo implement a monthly cap on their customer’s bandwidth, BT limit their users to 1 GB but Wanadoo’s is double that at 2 GB a month. Wanadoo currently have 0.7 million broadband users while BT has 1.7 million people subscribed to one of their broadband packages. Wanadoo have announced their ambition to match BT’s 1.7 million by 2008.