Wanadoo UK chalks up 150K VoIP users

'Telephony revolution'

Wanadoo UK has signed up 150,000 VoIP users over the last year, the broadband ISP boasted yesterday. This has prompted Wanadoo UK's boss to exclaim that this marks "the beginnings of a telephony revolution in the UK and the biggest winners are the consumers".

In a statement the France Telecom-owned ISP, which used to be known as Freeserve but is morphing soon to Orange, said: "The news confirms Wanadoo's position as Britain's Number One phone to phone consumer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider."

For the record, a BT spokesman said the firm had around 100,000 users of its BT Broadband Voice VoIP service.

According to the latest stats from industry regulator Ofcom, there are more than 500,000 active VoIP users in the UK benefiting from "a significantly lower-cost alternative to traditional fixed-line calls". And since more than 10 million households in the UK now have broadband, this number is predicted to grow rapidly.

Two weeks ago it emerged that France Telecom had chalked up more than a million residential VoIP accounts across Europe, with some 150,000 new subscribers being added each month across France, UK, The Netherlands, Italy and Spain. ®