RIP Freeserve

Freeserve, the number one dial-up ISP in the UK, is to get the chop in spring and be brought under the Wanadoo branding umbrella that its parent company, France Telecom, uses for its ISP across the channel.

While the name Wanadoo is well known in France, it's yet to make its mark over here. Wanadoo is a French ISP that bought out Freeserve in 2000 after being created by France Telecom some years earlier. It's now the largest service provider in Europe, with an annual profit last year of €159m.

And a good job, too, because the rebranding exercise is thought to be costing the company £20m.

The theory behind rebranding one of the internet stalwarts that rode out the bubble is that it's associated with being low-tech and that new branding would make the ISP appear more mature.

While there might be a new look and name for Freeserve, everything else should be business as usual. The ISP has said that none of Freeserve's more than two million email addresses or the way that customers connect to the web will be changing. While the Freeserve name has been a powerful asset for the company - its 2000 sale price was £1.6bn - with consumers shifting to broadband connections, the 'free' element has become slightly ironic.

As well as adopting a brand that will supposedly mean "power, passion and dynamism," according to the company, the move will carry other benefits for consumers, including more services and better reliability.

Jan Dawson, a senior analyst at Ovum, said that the new name will be a good move for the company.

"Overall, the benefits probably outweigh the disadvantages - broadband is the future, and Freeserve has to get that right if it is to maintain its pre-eminent UK market position. Otherwise, it risks the fate of AOL in the US market, where it is becoming increasingly irrelevant as subscribers move to broadband," she said in a statement.

Broadband figures large in the plans of Wanadoo, which now has 2.4 million out of its 9.1 million customers on the high-speed connection.

The identity shift has been widely anticipated and comes as part of a general restructuring chez France Telecom, which has seen the company gearing up to buy the remaining shares in Wanadoothat it doesn't currently own and shedding 14,500 jobs, as well as its mobile subsidiary, Orange, losing its CEO earlier this week.