LineOne was an

Internet Service Provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

in the 1990s. LineOne was a joint venture of

News International News Corp UK & Ireland Limited (trading as News UK, formerly News International and NI Group) is a List of newspapers in the United Kingdom, British newspaper publisher, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the American mass media Conglomerate (c ...

United News & Media UBM plc was a British business-to-business (B2B) events organiser headquartered in London, England, before its acquisition by Informa in 2018. It had a long history as a multinational media company. Its main focus was on B2B events, but its pr ...

and

British Telecom BT Group plc (trade name, trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is th ...

. It then became the UK branch of

Tiscali Tiscali S.p.a. () is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisitio ...

, which is now TalkTalk. As of October 2017, the "lineone.net" domain is still active for email (''username''@lineone.net) and website hosting (website.lineone.net/~''username''). More recently (October 2019), TalkTalk has notified LineOne customers that from 10 December 2019, unless they pay £5 per month or £50 per year or sign up to the TalkTalk broadband service, they will lose most Talk Talk features, will only have access to their mails through webmail and will start closing down free e-mail accounts.

History

Before LineOne was launched in 1997 as a joint venture between

and

, it was known as

Springboard Internet Services A springboard or diving board is used for diving and is a board that is itself a spring, i.e. a linear flex-spring, of the cantilever type. Springboards are commonly fixed by a hinge at one end (so they can be flipped up when not in use), and ...

and previously to that Delphi. This is not to be confused with, although it's related to, the company known as Delphi in the United States which had been purchased by News Corporation shortly before, and then sold on, and whose embryonic UK offerings were overseen by News International. Andrew Burke was the founding CEO and had previously run News International's Internet Publishing division responsible for putting The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun, News of the World and Today onto the web as well as Delphi in the UK. The official LineOne launch coincided with the publication of the 1997 Sunday Times 'Rich List'. The set up software was given away free with each copy of that weekend's Sunday Times. At this time the Helpdesk was run by BT from their office in Colindale, North London. In 1998,

bought a 33% stake in the company for an undisclosed sum. LineOne offered customers 0845 (Local Rate) access to the Internet (which required a monthly subscription) as well as offering e-mail and web hosting services, which were included in the subscription fee.

Freeserve Freeserve was a British Internet service provider, which was founded in 1998. At its height, the company became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index, before merging into the Wanadoo group in 2000. It then became a subsidiary of France Telecom, ...

launched in 1998, and was the first major ISP to offer a subscription free dialup service that only charged the standard per minute local call rate for access. LineOne was forced to follow suit with the same service to stem the flow of dialup customers and pressured BT into providing the infrastructure, which it did so and at considerable expense to LineOne.

From LineOne to Tiscali

In March 1999,

sold its shares in LineOne as it was concentrating on its own internet services, making

and

each 50% owners of LineOne. LineOne moved its offices to Blackfriar's Bridge from the offices they once occupied next to News International's printworks in Wapping. Ajay Chowdhury from United News & Media took over as CEO of LineOne and together with a new team including Mary Turner from AOL and Andy Harwood built LineOne into one of the largest ISP's and most trafficked portals in the UK. Chowdhury left in 2000 to set up NBC Internet Europe and Mary Turner was appointed the General Manager of LineOne. LineOne was then put up for sale after it became obvious that everyone involved was not going to make the hundreds of millions of pounds that LineOne was originally valued at in the middle of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

and it was bought by Italian telecommunications giant

on 26 April 2001 for GBP £62,000,000 (EUR €100,000,000). It was rumoured that before this sale, another large telecommunications giant had offered three to four times as much a year earlier and that by holding out for more money, the LineOne management missed the boat. At the time of acquisition, LineOne had 1.85 million subscribers, though the number of active users was probably around the 800,000 mark at the time. In June 2009, The UK operations of

were sold to

TalkTalk Group TalkTalk Telecom Group plc (commonly known as TalkTalk Group, trading as TalkTalk) is a company which provides pay television and Internet access services to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 2003 as a subsidiary ...

, part of

The Carphone Warehouse The Carphone Warehouse Limited was a mobile phone retailer based in London, United Kingdom. In August 2014 the company became a subsidiary of Currys plc (previously named "Dixons Carphone"), which was formed by the merger of its former parent Ca ...

plc. The LineOne point of presence continues to be served by this company. The acquisition was completed on 6 July 2009.- Completion of Tiscali Acquisition
accessed Feb 2010

References

External links

Review of lineone.net
at Robtex, accessed February 2010. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lineone BT Group News UK Informa TalkTalk Group Former internet service providers of the United Kingdom Defunct companies of the United Kingdom