Best Mobile Phone Provider – Which Provider Is The Best In The UK?

Virgin Mobile and ID Mobile provide the cheapest price to get started with a monthly tariff, whilst EE and BT Mobile are the most expensive the figures show.
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Which providers offer the cheapest tariff to get you started?

This list shows which provider is the best when it comes to the cheapest price for a monthly SIM only tariff to get you started with a mobile connection (prices at the time of the article).

ProviderPriceCalls/TextData
Virgin Mobile£5.00Unlimited3GB
ID Mobile£5.00Unlimited2GB
Giffgaff£6.00Unlimited2GB
SMARTY£6.00Unlimited4GB
Sky Mobile£7.00Unlimited3GB
Tesco Mobile£7.50Unlimited2GB
Three£8.00Unlimited1GB
Asda Mobile£9.00Unlimited 25GB
VOXI Mobile£10.00Unlimited30GB
O2 Mobile£10.00Unlimited5GB
Superdrug Mobile£10.00Unlimited5GB
Vodafone£11.00Unlimited1GB
BT Mobile£13.00Unlimited5GB
EE Mobile£14.00Unlimited1GB

Results

The best providers for the cheapest SIM only deal are SMARTY, Sky Mobile, GiffGaff and ID Mobile, all at £6.00 per month. They all provide Unlimited calls and texts with their monthly SIM. However, SMARTY, Giffgaff and ID Mobile all give 4MB of data whilst SKY Mobile gives you 2GB of data.

best mobile provider

Which providers offer the cheapest Unlimited Tarff

Here is the list for the cheapest monthly Unlimited Tariff for calls, text and data.

ProviderPriceCalls, Text, DataContract
ID Mobile£16.00Unlimited24 months
SMARTY£20.00Unlimited1 month
Three£20.00Unlimited12 months
Asda Mobile£20.00UnlimitedNo Contract
Virgin Mobile£25.00Unlimited24 months
Tesco Mobile£25.00Unlimited24 months
Vodafone £26.00Unlimited24 months
O2 Mobile £30.00Unlimited24 months
Giffgaff£35.00Unlimited18 Months
VOXI Mobile£35.00UnlimitedNo contract
EE Mobile£35.00Unlimited24 months

Results

For unlimited minutes, text and data, ID Mobile is the cheapest at £16.00 per month. This is followed by Smarty and Three at £20.00 per month. For ID Mobile and Three, they require you to go on a 12 months contract, whilst with SMARTY, you are only on a month’s contract.

Customer Service

We take a look at the customer satisfaction as provided by users to find out if they are happy with their mobile provider. We have used Trustpilot, to use for this data.

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Here is the list of providers in order of their customer service rating as given on Trustpilot. The rating is out of 5 Stars as the maximum.

Results

From the figures, we can see that Giffgaff has the best customer service rating from Trustpilot, which is 4.3 Stars out of 5 Stars. This is followed by SMARTY at 4.2 Stars out of 5 Stars in second place. In third position, is VOXI Mobile, with 3.9 Stars out of 5 Stars.

The worst customer service is from Virgin Mobile at 1.2 Stars out of 5 Stars and Vodafone at 1.3 Stars out of 5 Stars, the second worst. The third worst customer rating goes to O2 Mobile, at 1.4 Stars out of 5 Stars. Sky Mobile is not available on Trustpilot.

Mobile phone providers with their own network infrastructure

Here are all the providers from our feature, that have their own network infrastructure to deliver their mobile service.

  • EE
  • Vodafone
  • Three
  • O2

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNO)

Here is the list of MVNO’s and the providers they use.

MVNOHost Network
ID MobileThree
SMARTYThree
Virgin MobileEE
Tesco MobileO2
GiffgaffO2
Asda MobileVodafone
VOXI MobileVodafone
Sky MobileO2
BT MobileEE

Conclusion

This article would have given you some information so you can make a better judgement on the mobile provider that best meets your needs.

Here are links to the websites for the featured providers.

Additional Information

If you are interested, check out: Best Bank Accounts for Bad Credit.

If you are interested in home insurance, check out our article: Best Home Insurance Companies – UK.

For debt advice, go to: The National Debtline.