Freeserve

» see freeserve.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

freeserve was a british thing i only ever read about. it launched on 22 september 1998 as a joint venture between dixons group and a leeds hosting outfit called planet online. the pitch, credited to a dixons employee named ajaz ahmed, was that you could give away isp accounts to sell more pcs. instead of charging a monthly fee, freeserve took a cut of the per-minute telephone charge every time someone dialed the local access number.

this was the moment britain figured out that "free" was the whole product. by july 1999, ten months after launch, freeserve floated on the london stock exchange with about 1.3 million subscribers and a valuation somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 billion pounds. by september 2000 it had over 2 million active accounts. dixons had accidentally become the biggest isp in the uk.

i was 14 when this happened, on a 33.6k modem in ankara paying ttnet by the second because free-isp economics never made it to turkey. no local telco was going to give away access and split the metered-call revenue. the closest turkish equivalent was a friend who had a lucky superonline promo trial. reading the british tech press about freeserve floating a billion-pound ipo felt like a report from a country running on different economic physics.

~ the case file ~

~ the sale ~

dixons sold freeserve to wanadoo (france telecom's internet arm) in december 2000 for 1.65 billion pounds, cash and stock. by the time the deal closed the dot-com bubble had already popped. it is one of those transactions that looks perfectly timed in hindsight even though nobody involved knew they were selling at the top. wanadoo kept the freeserve brand alive for about four years while quietly migrating the backend.

~ the rebrand cycle ~

on 28 april 2004 freeserve became wanadoo uk plc. in june 2006 wanadoo uk got folded into orange (france telecom's consumer brand), so it became orange home uk plc. by that point the freeserve name only survived as email addresses (@freeserve.co.uk) and a few legacy landing pages. in august 2007 orange started deactivating dormant freeserve accounts on a 260-day timer. the personal webspace hosted under freeserve.co.uk went offline in 2016 and the email service closed in early 2017, but the freeserve brand itself was effectively gone by mid-2007.

~ what carried over ~

the freeserve business model got copied everywhere except turkey. tiscali and virgin net both followed the same trick: give away the isp, take a cut of the phone line. the whole model died when broadband replaced dial-up and the per-minute revenue stream disappeared. what dixons briefly proved is that the british telco price structure was mostly rent, and if you routed around it you could stand up two million subscribers in less than two years. after broadband nobody had that kind of arbitrage sitting on the table again.

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