BT stepped further away from its offspring O2 and announced a deal with T-Mobile in a new quest for mobile customers.

BT is to offer a bundled fixed and wireless phone service by reselling time on Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile network.

A BT spokesman told Reuters that the deal starts in the summer, and that the two companies will offer mobile packages to consumers.

The UK telco, which resells O2's mobile services to its business customers, launched a consumer mobile product with O2 called Mobile Sense last October.

Primarily targeted at the two million users of its website, BT said that Mobile Sense would continue until the launch of the new service.

The T-Mobile package will be much wider and bigger, with predicted revenues of £44m from consumer mobile and other services by 2005.