This paper describes the design, collection and postprocessing of the French SpeechDat corpus FRESCO. Being a database of approximately 35,000 utterances recorded from 1000 callers over the terrestrial telephone network in France, it comprises immediately usable and relevant speech for the initial training and assessment of speaker-independent phoneme-model or word-model based speech recognizers, as they are employed in automated telephone services. FRESCO is one of the 1000- speaker telephone speech databases produced as "case studies" within the European project SpeechDat(M).