EE under fire for closing Freeserve
TELECOMS giant EE has come under fire after deciding to permanently shut down Freeserve.
The company, now part of the BT Group, has announced that Freeserve, along with Orange and Wannadoo email accounts, will be shut down.
It will mean the final nail in the coffin of the Freeserve brand, which was launched by high street electrical chain Dixons as one of the first free dial-up internet services on September 22, 1998.
But the decision has angered those loyal Freeserve, Orange and Wanadoo users who still use the email accounts, with some suggesting legal action to stop the closure.
Freeserve’s email services became familiar to more than a million people in Britain mainly through free CDs handed out by Dixons to help new users access the internet. Within six months, it had one million subscribers, and other ISPs were scrambling to compete.
By the summer of 1999 it had become Britain’s first dot com to float on the stock market. In the spring of 2000 it had two million subscribers – compared to BT’s 400,000 – and it entered the FTSE 100.
At that stage Freeserve was making big losses but its value climbed to an extraordinary £9bn – more than its parent company Dixons.
But as the dot.com bubble began to deflate, Freeserve was taken over by Wanadoo in 2000 and then later by Orange. Orange and T-Mobile thenn merged to become EE.
EE said it decided to close Freeserve email from May 31, 2017. Accounts affected are Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness. co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail. net, Fsworld.co.uk, Fsnet.co. uk, Orange.net, Orangehome. co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk and new.labour.org.uk.