Heading back to UK soonish, wife needs a new phone so was going to buy her one when I am back in a few weeks so we have a UK contact number. She wants a 5s (her choice, no debate). Who is best provider to get it from – either pp or contract although we might struggle with that as no UK address.

Bump for the returner

Not sure about iPhones as you might get a better deal on contract but there are some great PAYG sim only deals now. I’m on GiffGaff, which is pretty good. The big plus is you can try it out, if it doesn’t work for you try another one rather than being tied in for 18 months.

depends what the lady in question wants to use her phone for….

If it’s voice calls and texting GiffGaff is possibly the cheapest at the expense of terrible sound quality on wide areas of the network where half-rate codec is used. It’s also worth looking at the 321 pay as you go product on Three – 3 per min for calls, 2p per text, 1p per Mb data).

If your wife wants to use her phone for the web / data, the coverage areas of the main networks are as follows:

4G
EE – 70%
Three – 35%
O2 and Vodafone 25-30%

3G
EE – 98.7%
Three – 98%
o2 – 91%
Vodafone – 90%

Root Metrics UK provides a lot of independently collected and crown sourced data on coverage / call quality and is worth a look.

Thanks all

Depends where you live….. I had to buy myself out of my contract due to a lack of signal at my new house despite being in suburbia