Present 1,000 Miles Away –
Without Leaving Your Desk.

First Dixons brought us Freeserve, the start-up business that became the UK’s most popular internet service provider after its launch in 1998. Now it is bringing us Freetalk, what it hopes will be the UK’s most popular internet phone calls business and another significant threat to BT Group’s dominance of the home phone market.

Freeserve had a market value of £8bn at the height of the dot.com boom in 2000 and Dixons, or DSG International as the retail group is now known, made more than £600m from selling the business.

From Thursday, punters will be able to buy Freetalk adapters from PC World, Currys and The Link stores as well as from 50 Dixons stores enabling them to plug their phone into their broadband connection and make free calls. For £79.99, customers can buy a Freetalk package giving them the adapter and a year’s subscription to the service. After that Freetalk costs £6.99 a month for “unlimited UK landline calls”.

Said Simon Turner of DSG International (the new name for Dixons): “This is the most significant development in the telephone market since the launch of the mobile phone and will transform the way we use phones. The days of old-style fixed-line phone calls are numbered.”