The first, the last, my everything? (Freeserve)

Member Name: dave27

Product:	Freeserve
Date:	28/11/01 (184 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Innovative

Disadvantages: Patchy service

When the Internet really took hold of the UK market in the second half of the 1990's, the thing that probably drove the massive increase in popularity was the product offering promised by Freeserve, who were the first internet service provider "to offer a mass market, subscription-free Internet access service for the cost of a local phone call". The quote comes from Freeserve's own website - http://www.freeserve.com/ - which goes on to boast "Within five months Freeserve had opened one million customer accounts and became the clear market leader, revolutionising the home Internet access market in the UK. On 2 August 1999, after only ten months of operation, Freeserve was listed on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, with Dixons continuing to own approximately 80% of Freeserve. The IPO allocated to institutional and retail investors 153,043,478 shares, of which 90,000,000 were new shares issued by Freeserve, raising the sum of £135 million, and 63,043,478 were shares sold by Dixons. In addition, Dixons granted to Credit Suisse First Boston an option over a further 22,956,522 shares to cover over-allotments. The Freeserve Offering was over 30 times subscribed, with more than 50,000 applicants for shares in the UK retail offering. At the Offer price of 150 pence per share Freeserve was valued at £1.51 billion."

Clearly the numbers game is a critical one for them and they like boasting of how successful they have been as an organisation, but for months there was suspicion about whether the Freeserve business model could ever really succeed, especially as many of their competitors started to go to the wall.

AltaVista's revolutionary promise of flat rate, always on Internet access sparked a new phase in the game, even though they never actually delivered anything. Freeserve struggled for some time to maintain a decent service and had to close down to new members for a while as they started trying to get their act toge
ther. They've gone back into the mass market again now and are pushing the flat rate services - their website lists their various packages as follows -

Freeserve AnyTime gives you free Internet calls, day and night for just £12.99 per month with no call charges -

Freeserve HomeTime allows you to use the Internet at home without worrying about being charged for calls.
For a flat rate of £8.99 per month, all Internet calls from evenings between 6pm-8am Mon-Fri and all weekend calls 6pm Friday to 8am Monday are absolutely free.

When you register with Freeserve you can simply pay for your Internet calls as you use them. Calls are charged at local call rates and there are no monthly subscriptions.

FreeservePlus keeps you computer connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for a flat fee of £44.99 per month.

The rest of the package consists of unlimited e-mail addresses, 15 Mb of free webspace, 'free' online customer support (which costs you 50p a minute!) "and a fortnightly email newsletter with exclusive offers" (OOOOH!!! How exciting!)

These days that assortment of packages is pretty standard, although my preference is AOL's flat rate service at £14.99 per month for access whenever I want. You can't really argue with the Freeserve range, however.

Freeserve was originally an inspired development by the Dixons electronics retail group and was sprung on an unsuspecting world towards the end of 1998. A couple of years later, Wanadoo, the French media organisation bought up Freeserve, seeing it as the UK arm of their Europe wide empire.


Now of course comes the acid question - is Freeserve actually any good?

Well, I signed up with Freeserve about 18 months ago, like many others in the UK, and in fact launched my first website - www.tom1385.fsnet.co.uk - on their free webspace. However, because I wasn't a regular user and didn't s
tay active my membership lapsed and they pulled my website without telling me, the naughty chaps.

My experience was that Freeserve was actually pretty good, with some decent content on their portal, although I got very concerned when they started blocking new memberships and the Freeserve extension is pretty damn unhip. It's got its place, but it's not my fave, although Freeserve has undoubtedly attracted enormous interest and membership in the last three years, and almost singlehandedly revolutionised the ISP market.

The authoritative PC Pro magazine carried out its annual review of ISP's a few months ago and were pretty scathing about the Freeserve offering. Among other things, Davey Winder says "Perhaps it should come as no surprise to find the embattled BT sitting none too prettily at the bottom of the ten player pile ... not performing much better was Freeserve, also maintaining a not so fine tradition of hovering around the bottom of our ISP league. In fact, the overall scores for BT and Freeserve were within a hair's breadth of each other. Freeserve did slightly better than BT, ending up ninth for connection, eighth for services and ninth for support, but not sufficiently - we hope - to save it from being equally shamefaced over its showing ... Freeserve has a healthy market share, but not all of its users are happy with the service."

Now the bits I've seen from regular users of the service tend to support that view, although Freeserve certainly seems to have got its act together after a fairly ropey time with its service when it first started. I can't recommend Freeserve, but it might be right for you...

Summary: