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By Ben King, 4 April 2002 17:33

NEWS Britain's second-largest broadband ISP, Pipex, is backing BT in the telco's war of words with Freeserve over ADSL. Pipex managing director David Rickards was uncompromising in his comments about Freeserve, accusing the company of attacking BT as a way of distracting attention from its own failure to market broadband effectively. He told silicon.com: "This is below the belt tactics by Freeserve. To me it sends out signs of commercial weakness and illustrates the hesitancy of their own broadband plans. "Their business plan has let them down and they are doing the broadband story no favours by attacking BT like this. Freeserve needs to learn that the business is about provisioning customers and providing a service, not just getting CDs into shops." Supplying broadband requires significant advance planning - it takes three months to order backbone network capacity from BT, so ISPs have to predict demand three months in advance. Pipex launched a massive campaign to sign up broadband customers in February. In little over two months it has attracted 14,000 users, and is currently adding customers at the rate of 400 per day, Rickards said. BT wholesale's total ADSL customer base is around 160,000, of whom 100,000 are customers of BTopenworld.