Redstone Telecom , which provides voice services to small and medium sized businesses, said yesterday that it wanted to acquire an internet service provider after buying data group Fastnet for £40m.

Graham Cove, Redstone chief executive said the company wanted to turn itself into a one-stop shop for its clients.

The aim is to offer a full range of services before the break-up of BT's monopoly over the local telephone network next year.

Mr Cove said any deal to acquire an internet service provider would focus on a specialist business to business company and the deal was likely be in the same price range as the Fastnet acquisition. He stressed, however, that nothing was on the table.

"Redstone wants a dominant share of the broadband access market for small and medium sized businesses providing voice, data and internet," Mr Cove said.

"The Fastnet deal really strengthens our offering - by taking us into the data markets in a big way. There will be more acquisitions as we work toward the bigger picture."

Redstone leases a backbone network across Britain from Fibrenet and has websites in 40 cities.

The company is now laying new cable from those points to local BT exchanges and will be able to take over the so-called last mile to customers' doorsteps once the market is open for competition.

Redstone plans to deploy DSL technology on BT's network which upgrades old copper wires for broadband use.

A rights issue last month raised £1,251m to fund the development of Redstone's network. Redstone also announced yesterday that it had secured a £50m credit facility through investment bank UBS Warburg.

Shares in Redstone climbed 4p to 252.5p but are still some way off their peak of 954p in February.