plc), at which point they had approximately 1.3 million subscribers and were valued at between £1.31bn and £1.51bn ($2.02bn - $2.34bn). By September 2000, Freeserve had more than two million active subscribers. This was vastly more than the incumbent telephone provider BT, something that was unique for a European ISP. Freeserve was bought by the France Télécom-owned company Wanadoo in 2000 for £1.65bn ($2.37bn). Freeserve began to trial the emerging ADSL broadband service in early 2000. The original equipment supplied was a rack-type hard-wired modem and a separate router. A year later, the supplied end-user equipment was just a small USB-based modem, the Thomson SpeedTouch 330. Later, as Orange, they supplied a wireless ADSL modem router, the Orange-badged Siemens SE572, with one Ethernet port. Successive rebrandings After being bought by Wanadoo in 2000, Freeserve first had its name changed to Wanadoo UK plc on 28 April 2004. Following a new rebranding exercise in June 2006, Freeserve and Wanadoo UK then formed part of the UK operation of Orange, and were known as Orange Home UK plc. In 2010 Orange UK and T-Mobile UK merged to form EE which was a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and France Télécom. Orange's broadband service was then rebranded as EE Broadband on 30 October 2012. Deactivation In August 2007, Orange started a process to purge unused Freeserve accounts from its system. Originally Freeserve accounts would be deactivated after ninety days if the dial-up number was not accessed (hence not generating any revenue for Orange). Customers would then receive an error message when trying to access their Freeserve email via another connection, but could reactivate the account before it was deleted by simply visiting the Orange website. Orange extended the deactivation period to 260 days in 2007 but under the new regime users' accounts and all email are deleted permanently from Orange's servers after a 30-day warning is issued. The account deactivation process ceased on 28 February 2012. In 2016 the service hosting the original Freeserve personal webspace was deactivated, ending the anomaly of orphaned pages that could not be edited, the dial-up service allowing editing having ceased some years before. In early 2017 all email users were advised that the email service was also withdrawn. References External links Getting on the net for nothing, 20 May 1999, Jim Mcclellan, The Guardian 1998 establishments in the United Kingdom Companies based in Hemel Hempstead Companies formerly