In 2001, the UK arm of Tiscali, one of Europe's largest internet service providers was, in the words of its chief executive, Renato Soru, "in a terrible mess". Having risen out of nothing and bought out most of its smaller competitors, the ISP, which was made up of nine different businesses, was struggling to establish itself in the increasingly competitive internet access marketplace.

However, two years later Tiscali is launching its long-awaited comeback. It has restructured and established one brand for all its ISPs, and is now vying with its arch-rivals Freeserve, AOL and BT for a slice of the potentially lucrative broadband pie. Leading the comeback is Mary Turner, who last month was promoted from UK MD to chief executive of Tiscali. She admits that the past 24 months have "been very challenging" for the Italian ISP in the UK but is adamant that, despite industry rumour to the contrary, it is "successful, sustainable and profitable".

According to Turner, the arrival of Tiscali in the UK in 2001 was almost by coincidence and came about purely as a result of its acquisitions in France and the Netherlands of Liberty Surf and World Online, which had very small UK operations. "We were not a thought-through business," she adds.

Having inherited a foothold in the ultra-competitive UK internet access market, Tiscali decided to build on it by acquiring LineOne, an ISP with more than one million customers, which its owners BT and United Business Media had been trying to offload.

"Buying LineOne proved Tiscali's commitment to the UK because it was a substantial investment. It was a huge task for us to bring the nine brands together and we've been working to do this for the past two years," says Turner.

The Tiscali brand is still not established in the UK. There's still confusion among both customers and industry watchers about what exactly Tiscali is trying to achieve.

Rebecca Jennings, an analyst for Forrester Research, says that unlike, say, AOL and Freeserve, Tiscali has faced a struggle to establish a foothold in the UK because of the disparate companies it has brought together.

"Building the brand has proved much more difficult in the UK than overseas. Most of its customers were used to having a different branded ISP, and unlike AOL and Freeserve they were not starting from scratch, going on a massive grab for customers."

At a time when there's general acceptance across the industry that the net is no longer free and most of the UK's ISPs and the likes of MSN and Yahoo! have embarked on a drive to make content and services pay, you would think it natural for Tiscali to go down this route too, and try to cash in on some of its 1.4 million customers.

But while most of its peers are either charging or planning ways to charge for enhanced email, virus protection, downloadable music and online gaming, Tiscali is adamant that it will remain 100% focused on driving most of its profits from internet access, either narrowband or broadband.

Turner says that as far as she's concerned, premium services, as they've been badged by MSN, Yahoo! and others, "are not new to the internet" and will only account for a small amount of Tiscali's business.

"With consumers' use of the internet maturing and more people getting broadband, services like enhanced email, digital downloads and virus protection are becoming more mass-market. Yet the fundamental product for us is still access."

In a bid to take advantage of this maturation of the internet and the advent of paid-for services, Tiscali is about to launch a charged-for music digital download service across Europe, in conjunction with the musician Peter Gabriel's OD2.

For less than € 1 (69p), Tiscali customers will be able to download tracks and then burn them on to CDs. The launch of the service follows a summer-long promotion offering an album of tracks for £9.99, which attracted over 100,000 customers across the continent.

Richard Ayers, Tiscali's portal director, admits that similar services are already on offer in the UK from competitors such as MSN and Freeserve, but he claims that Tiscali's will be different "because it's not just a straightforward digital download service". Instead he says that it will offer artists' biographies, archive tracks and "a vast amount of content" on each artist or track. Tiscali also has plans to launch pay-per-view films, though Ayers admits that at the moment this is difficult because the film studios are refusing to release them on to the net for fear of piracy.

"We have very little paid-for content on the portal at the moment and it's biased towards our broadband customers, but this is going to change and we are working out the best way of doing this," he says.

One other service that Tiscali is looking to introduce - which is bound to cause controversy because of recent events - is video chat. Ayers says that it will be open to any of its customers with a web cam and will enable chatroom users to watch each other while chatting. However, he acknowledges that this could alarm both children's charities and the government for fear of paedophile activity so "it will be strictly moderated".

So if Tiscali is not anticipating making the lion's share of its future revenue from what it's calling value-added services, where will the profits come from?

When the Italian giant arrived in the UK in 2001, it boasted that it would rival Freeserve, AOL and Yahoo! but so far it has only registered as a small blip on their radar screens. Forrester's Jennings says Tiscali was never "going to topple the big three" because it would have required millions of pounds spent on marketing "which would have been a total waste of money".

Instead of trying to beat its bigger adversaries at their own game and throwing away millions on marketing, Tiscali is planning to offer what it's calling flexible access to UK consumers. Broadband has finally arrived and is being taken up - albeit very slowly - and Tiscali is now planning to piggyback on this slow growth.

Turner says she's convinced that one of the key reasons broadband is still not a must-have for the home is because of its high price (£30 a month from most ISPs). To counter this Tiscali is planning to launch mid-range access packages which will give customers broadband for a much lower price but may not be available 24/7 or may not provide as high bandwidth as normal packages do.

"We're looking at what the market really wants from broadband. At the moment, for a lot of people, the price for broadband doesn't stack up, yet the benefits do; we want to take advantage of this," she says.

In line with AOL, Tiscali is also going to tie up distribution deals with leading high-street chains, and is on the verge of announcing an accord with WH Smith that will see it distributing both broadband and narrowband access in its 750 stores nationwide.

Tiscali claims that there's a niche within the growing high-speed access market for it to fall into and if its mid-range, high-speed packages are successful, then it could provide a much-needed access service to UK net users.

But if it doesn't work and it's forced to carry on operating in the shadow of the big three ISPs, then its ambitious acquisition strategy two years ago could all have been in vain.