Wanadoo UK Broadband

Wanadoo UK existed for just over two years. It replaced the Freeserve name in April 2004, grew its broadband customer base to around 2.6 million, and was then replaced by the Orange name in June 2006. For most customers the change was invisible; a letter arrived, the website looked different for a while, and the service continued. Wanadoo was never intended to be a long-term brand in the UK. It was a staging post, a French company's attempt to give a coherent identity to an asset it had bought from a British electronics retailer, before a larger corporate consolidation made even that name redundant.

Where it came from: Freeserve and the Wanadoo acquisition

To understand Wanadoo, you have to start with Freeserve. Launched in September 1998 by Dixons Group and Leeds-based hosting firm Planet Online, Freeserve was one of the UK's first internet providers to drop the standard monthly subscription charge. Customers buying a PC from Dixons could install Freeserve's software and get online paying only BT's standard call charges, with no separate fee to the provider. The model attracted millions of customers quickly. Within a couple of years Freeserve had more subscribers than BT's own internet service and had floated on the stock market.

By 2000, Dixons was looking to exit. The all-share deal it eventually accepted came from Wanadoo, the internet division of France Telecom. Wanadoo paid the equivalent of around £1.65 billion for Freeserve, valuing each share at 157 pence. The deal closed in December 2000 and made Wanadoo the largest ISP (internet service provider) in two of Europe's three biggest economies. France Telecom held the majority of Wanadoo's shares; the French state, in turn, was the majority shareholder in France Telecom.

For three years after the acquisition, Freeserve kept its own name. Wanadoo had considered rebranding earlier but shelved the plan around 2003 over concerns that the Wanadoo name had no consumer recognition in the UK. The Freeserve name, by contrast, remained well known. Eventually, the parent company decided the time was right. In April 2004, Freeserve was renamed Wanadoo UK. The company spent £20 million on advertising the change, with television, press, outdoor and online campaigns running throughout the spring. The "hippies" creative used in the rebrand ads, showing scruffy characters tidying themselves up, was intended to signal a step towards a more grown-up broadband identity.

Wanadoo broadband packages and pricing

Wanadoo launched its UK broadband offer at the same moment as the rebrand in April 2004, using the name change to reposition the service in the market. The entry-level package was a 512k (kilobit per second; roughly half the speed of the 1Mbps services then becoming standard) connection at £17.99 a month with a 2GB monthly download allowance. At launch this was a price point specifically designed to undercut BT's comparable Basic broadband product, which was priced at £19.99 and limited customers to just 1GB a month. Heavier users could pay £27.99 for a 512k connection with a 15GB cap, or £34.99 for a 1Mbps service with a 30GB allowance.

In August 2004, Wanadoo cut its pricing further, bringing 1Mbps (megabit per second; the unit used to measure broadband download speed) broadband to the entry tier at £17.99 a month. This was a meaningful step in a market where 1Mbps had previously cost significantly more. The 1Mbps package came with a 2GB monthly usage cap; a 6GB version cost £22.99, and a 30GB version cost £27.99. Customers who could not receive 1Mbps at their exchange received 512k instead at the same price.

In July 2005, Wanadoo doubled the standard speed for new customers again, offering 2Mbps as the entry-level connection at the same £17.99 price. Existing customers could upgrade to 2Mbps for a one-off £20 fee, a condition that attracted some criticism from customers who felt they were being penalised for loyalty. That same autumn, Wanadoo began rolling out LLU (local loop unbundling; a process where a provider installs its own equipment directly in the BT telephone exchange, removing reliance on BT's wholesale pricing and typically allowing faster speeds) at selected exchanges. Customers connected to an unbundled exchange could access speeds up to 8Mbps (megabits per second) for £17.99 a month, though subject to a 2GB download cap at that price.

Wanadoo supplied customers with its own hardware. Early packages used the Thomson SpeedTouch USB modem. From 2004 onwards the company pushed its Livebox, a combined wireless router and ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line; the technical standard behind most broadband connections of the era, using existing copper telephone lines) modem that also supported internet telephone calls. The Livebox was positioned as a premium option and was one of the first consumer-grade routers to combine broadband and voice over internet in a single device.

All packages were sold with a monthly contract, though download caps were a persistent irritant. Customers who exceeded their monthly allowance had their speeds throttled or faced additional charges depending on the tier. Forum posts from the period document customers being contacted about exceeding a 30GB allowance on packages they believed were unlimited, and others complaining that caps had been applied without clear disclosure at the point of sale.

Customer service and regulatory issues

Wanadoo's customer service record during its two years of trading was mixed. Forum threads from MoneySavingExpert and similar sites in 2005 and 2006 contain a consistent pattern of complaints: billing errors resulting in bank charges, difficulty reaching technical support by telephone, and problems obtaining MAC codes (Migration Authorisation Codes; the number a customer needs to switch broadband provider without losing service) when trying to leave. One widely cited complaint involved a customer who lost their broadband connection for several weeks, during which Wanadoo's support team attributed the fault to BT, while BT in turn said only the provider could raise the repair request. The customer eventually discovered the fault lay with Wanadoo all along, after making more than forty calls.

On the regulatory front, Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) investigated a complaint about unfair terms in Wanadoo's AnyTime service contract in 2004. The investigation found several clauses that allowed Wanadoo to exclude liability in ways that could be unfair under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. Wanadoo agreed to amend the problematic clauses rather than contest the findings. The terms in question related to Wanadoo's exclusion of responsibility for errors in its own information, and its exclusion of liability for damage caused by viruses delivered through its email service.

Separately, Wanadoo UK was involved in a Competition Appeal Tribunal case from 2004 onwards concerning BT's pricing practices for wholesale ADSL access. Wanadoo, along with other providers, had complained that BT was engaged in a margin squeeze (charging rival providers so much for wholesale access that they could not profitably compete with BT's own retail arm). The case ran for several years and was eventually withdrawn in 2010, long after Wanadoo itself had ceased to exist as a brand.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) also adjudicated on a complaint about Wanadoo's broadband speed advertising in August 2004, as part of a broader period of scrutiny across the industry over the gap between headline "up to" speeds and actual speeds customers received. This was an industry-wide problem rather than specific to Wanadoo, and the ASA's approach at the time was still evolving; stricter rules on speed advertising did not take full effect until years later.

The rebrand to Orange, June 2006

By late 2005 France Telecom had decided to consolidate all of its consumer brands worldwide under the Orange name. Orange was the mobile brand it had acquired in 2000 and it carried stronger consumer recognition globally than Wanadoo. In June 2005 the plan was announced publicly. France Telecom said it expected to spend around 200 million euros across all its markets on the transition.

In the UK the change took effect on 1 June 2006. Wanadoo UK plc became Orange Home UK plc. The wanadoo.co.uk domain was redirected. Customers' account pages, billing documents and support contact details all switched to the Orange brand. Customers who had recently joined Wanadoo with promises of new packages received those packages under the Orange name instead; one customer reported being offered a month's free broadband by a Wanadoo adviser in the weeks before the switch, specifically to keep them with the service until the new Orange packages launched.

The transition was broadly seamless from a technical standpoint. Nobody lost their connection. The underlying network, support infrastructure and most of the staff were unchanged. Customers who had freeserve.co.uk email addresses from the original Freeserve era were largely able to keep them; those addresses had already survived two previous rebrands and continued to function under Orange for several more years.

What happened to customers after Wanadoo

The 2.6 million customers who were on Wanadoo when the rebrand happened became Orange Broadband customers in June 2006. Orange Broadband ran until October 2012, when the service was renamed EE Broadband following the merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK into Everything Everywhere (EE). BT acquired EE in January 2016 for £12.5 billion. The customer lineage that began with Freeserve in 1998, passed through Wanadoo in 2004, became Orange in 2006, became EE in 2012, and is today part of BT Group.

For many customers, the full chain of rebrands passed unnoticed. Someone who signed up to Freeserve in 1999 and never actively switched provider would have become a Wanadoo customer in 2004, an Orange customer in 2006, and an EE customer in 2012, each time without taking any action themselves. The practical consequences of each change were minor: a different name on the bill, a different phone number for support, an updated router interface. The connection worked, or it did not, largely independent of which name appeared on the letterhead.

In summary

Wanadoo UK was a transitional brand. It existed to give France Telecom's UK broadband business a coherent identity after the Freeserve acquisition, and to position that business more clearly in the growing broadband market. Its two years of operation produced some real pricing milestones: the sub-£20 1Mbps package in 2004 and the 2Mbps entry-level service in 2005 both helped push broadband costs down during a period when the market was expanding quickly. The service record was patchy and the customer support complaints were genuine. When Orange replaced the Wanadoo name in 2006, few customers mourned it; most simply did not notice.