Small networks guidance

Four companies own mobile masts in Britain. Every other brand buys capacity wholesale and resells the same radio waves under a different name.

One sentence covers it: the landlord decides your coverage; the brand decides your price, your support and how soon you get new features.

A cheaper brand is not a weaker network. The transmissions are the same ones the landlord's own customers are using, from the same masts, at the same power.

One technical caveat deserves mentioning: at genuinely saturated masts, the owner's customers can be given priority over rented traffic. In ordinary daily use it is invisible.

giffgaff — on O2. Entirely online with a member community and no telephone support, by design. Consistently competitive on mid-size allowances, and the cheapest reliable way to test O2's coverage.

SMARTY — on Three. Run by Three itself, so it carries the host's full performance including its speed advantage in towns. A deliberately simple rolling grid.

iD Mobile — on Three. A retailer's brand competing hardest on price per gigabyte, with data rollover on some tiers. Satisfaction scores have trailed the leaders in some years.

VOXI — on Vodafone. Leaves selected social and video apps outside the allowance, which can dramatically increase usable data.

Lebara — on Vodafone. Built around international calling on inexpensive rolling plans.

1pMobile — on EE. Charges per minute, per text and per megabyte on the widest network in Britain.

Handset finance is generally unavailable on these brands, so phones are bought outright. That is not a drawback: an outright handset plus a cheap SIM is usually the lowest total cost available anywhere in the market.

It also removes the end-of-term trap entirely, because there is no device element left to keep paying for once the phone is yours.

Several of these brands sell prepaid credit alongside bundles, and one sells nothing but per-unit billing — charging for exactly what you consume on EE's masts.

For somebody making a few calls a week that arrangement is the cheapest in the country. For anyone with a normal data habit it climbs quickly.

eSIM support here is broad but not uniform — several of these brands added it after the mast owners, and it can still depend on your handset model.

An eSIM is your plan written into a chip already inside the handset rather than posted on plastic. The service is identical; what changes is speed — minutes rather than days — and the ability to hold a second line alongside your main one.

That second line is what makes travelling dramatically cheaper: a local data profile for data, your UK number left live for calls and texts.

These are mobile propositions and generally do not sell broadband. What you give up in bundling you get back in a lower monthly mobile price, which for most single-service households is the better trade.

Roaming follows the brand's own terms and never the landlord's, even though the signal is identical. This trips people up constantly.

At home, on the handset, unlimited is genuinely unmetered — here and on the other mast owners. Three published conditions bend it, and all three are readable before you sign.

Before buying any allowance, read three months of recorded usage in your current app. People routinely buy about twice what they consume.

Three figures get quoted at you and only one describes what you will actually pay across the agreement.

Bills rise for five reasons, every one printed somewhere before you signed.

And they fall for five, none of which happen by themselves.

Apps and dashboards here are lighter than the mast owners'. Several brands are online-first and one runs entirely without telephone support as a deliberate choice, which is part of why the price is what it is. Decide before you buy whether that matters to you.

Most reported faults trace to one of four causes, and two are cured by free settings you already have.

Every fault and every complaint goes to the brand that bills you, never to the network that owns the masts.

Switching runs entirely on text messages. No conversation is required and none can be insisted upon.

Your network cannot refuse the code, sit on it, attach conditions to it, or make a retentions conversation a precondition of leaving. Retention offers are lawful and occasionally good — but take the code first, so you are choosing rather than asking.

On rolling plans there is usually no exit charge at all, which is exactly what makes these brands the sensible way to test any of the four networks.

In a sentence: the same radio waves for less, with the saving coming out of the support desk rather than the network — a very good trade for most households.