New Mobile Phone Contract Required

The best deal might be Smarty depending on your usage.

You might not have heard of them because they only started in August 2017. Smarty is a sub-brand of Three. It provides even better value than giffgaff which is a sub-brand of O2.

£5/month for unlimited calls and texts. You only pay for the data you use, and the data is cheap at £1.25/GB

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMARTY

smarty.co.uk/sim-only?utm_mediu … lsrc=aw.ds

If you don’t want a monthly bundle, then both Three and O2 now offer 3/2/1 PAYG deals meaning 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text, and 1p/MB data. Three have been offering this deal for quite a while, but O2 have only recently started this offer. I carry both of these SIMS in case of networks problems and spend less than £1/month on both.

You could also consider a 12-month 12GB data SIM from Three priced at £40. It could be useful for a satnav. I’ve been using one in my satnav and 12GB easily lasts me one year, in fact, I don’t even use 6GB. When it runs out, I might get a Smarty SIM instead, as £5/month for unlimited calls/texts and 6GB of data over the year would only cost £67.50/year with the Smarty SIM, so only £27.50 more than the 12-month 12GB data SIM from Three, but with unlimited calls/texts…although I’m not a big caller or texter so it might not have that much value to me. If you go in a Three shop and ask about this 12-month 12GB data SIM, expect the store salesperson to try and upsell you to a more profitable contract. Decide what you want before visiting a store and don’t be swayed by sales tactics. If in doubt, walk away and think about it!

If you use a lot of data, then a Three 12-month contract costs £27/month for unlimited data or £20/month for 100GB of data. Unlimited calls and texts included.

three.co.uk/Store/SIM/Plans_for_phones

Avoid Vodafone as they are regularly voted the worst mobile network in the UK according to Which? magazine closely followed by EE. Both Three and O2 are better. One of the nice things about Three is that you can block premium rate numbers and texts so that you don’t get out of allowance bill shock. AFAIK, the other networks won’t let you block premium rate calls and texts on their contracts. Don’t confuse contracts with PAYG, as they are two separate things.