Wanadoo 'UK's number one' VoIP outfit, says Wanadoo

My VoIP's bigger than your VoIP

Wanadoo - which was humiliated by BT yesterday following a spat over an ad - reckons it's the UK's top broadband telephony outfit with more than 80,000 registered users.

And with numbers growing by some 5,000 a week the ISP looks set to break through the 100,000 barrier by Christmas.

The France Telecom-owned ISP says its Wireless & Talk VoIP service is a doddle to use. Or as boss Eric Abensur puts it: "There is no software to download, no fiddly headphones and you're not tied to your computer."

He added that "phone-to-phone is the way forward for VoIP services" and that this had been underlined by the fact that Wanadoo's 80,000 punters had been signed up in just seven months.

"BT's Communicator product took around 20 months from launch to attract 50,000 registrations," said Wanadoo in a statement.

However, BT may have something to say about Wanadoo's latest claims. BT Communicator software - which enabled PC-to-PC calls - has been downloaded 1.5m times with some 60,000 punters paying for the Communicator service as well.

BT also has some 5,000 punters signed up to its Broadband Voice service "but we expect that to rise significantly over the coming months as we bundle it with broadband", said a spokesman.

"We're going to going to be putting some really interesting offers out to attract new VoIP customers over the next few months," he said.

No one from Dixons - which launched its "son of Freeserve" Freetalk VoIP service in September - was available for comment at the time of writing ®