BT is teaming up with Yahoo from the autumn

BT's internet service provider will rebrand both its narrowband and broadband services from the autumn.

The new BT Yahoo Services will draw on Yahoo's vast content library and also take advantage of the growing popularity of Yahoo applications such as its instant messaging service.

"Yahoo has some really good applications such as IM, games, news, personalisation services, photo albums and file storage," said Ian Fogg, an analyst with Jupiter Media.

More broadband customers

I firmly believe BT Yahoo Broadband offers a vastly superior customer experience compared to the likes of AOL and Freeserve Duncan Ingram, BT Openworld

"Yahoo needs to do deals with access providers and it is not a natural fit for telecoms companies to do content so the deal benefits both," he added.

BT is also hoping it will persuade more customers to make the switch to broadband although it has set the newly formed ISP a relatively low target.

It is hoping the new deal will attract just 60,000 extra customers by March 2004.

As a wholesaler, BT has very ambitious targets for broadband, looking to increase its recently announced one million customers to three million by 2005.

About half of these are connected via rival ISPs such as Freeserve and AOL but using a BT telephone line.

Currently BT Openworld has around 300,000 customers and BT's no frills broadband product has around 170,000 - well short of the 500,000 customers it was hoping to attract by this summer.

The new BT Yahoo brand will put it back on track with its rivals BT hopes.