Carphone Warehouse Phones: Prices, Networks and the Small Print

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Carphone Warehouse has been putting handsets in British pockets since before most people owned one. The company behind the name, Currys Retail Limited, was incorporated on 26 June 1987 and traded as The Carphone Warehouse Limited from 22 January 1991 right through to 4 October 2021. The name now sits on a website that gives free next-day home delivery across mainland UK, seven days a week, on anything ordered before 8pm, or free collection from a Currys store with 14 days to walk in and pick it up. Pay-monthly handsets open at £14.99 a month for a Google Pixel 10a with £59 up front, and SIM-only plans start at £6 a month for 10GB on a rolling one-month deal.

Two things have changed since the days of the high-street shops, and both are worth knowing before you look. All 531 standalone Carphone Warehouse branches shut in 2020, with roughly 2,900 jobs going with them, so the brand is an online operation trading under Currys rather than a chain you can walk into. And the network line-up shrank: O2 ended its agreement in March 2020 and EE followed in September 2020. The site keeps a standing page telling customers of both that “Our agreement with O2 & EE has now ended, so you won't be able to upgrade your O2 or EE contract through us anymore.” What it sells today is Vodafone, VOXI and iD Mobile.

The shop behind the website is not a small one. Currys plc reported group revenue of £9,254m for the year ended 2 May 2026, up 6%, with adjusted profit before tax of £191m, up 18%, year-end net cash of £176m and 691 stores across six countries. Its own mobile network, iD Mobile, passed 2.6 million subscribers over the same year, an 18% rise, with a target of at least 2.8 million by the end of the current one. A phone bought here is delivered by a FTSE-listed retailer with a returns desk in most towns, which is not nothing when a handset arrives faulty.

What £14.99 a month buys, and what it turns into

The pay-monthly range is priced the way handset retail has been priced for two decades: a deposit, then a single figure covering the phone and an allowance. The site puts it plainly — “Each month, in one hassle-free payment, you'll pay for the phone plus an allowance of minutes, texts, and data.” At the cheap end that means £59 up front and £14.99 a month for a Google Pixel 10a. In the middle, an Apple iPhone 16e runs at £9 up front and £22.99 a month, and a Samsung Galaxy S26 at £29 and £27.99. At the top, an iPhone 17 Pro Max opens at £44.99 a month. Nine deals carry no up-front payment at all; the dearest deposits run past £200.

Twenty-four months is the standard term on a handset deal, with 12-month and 36-month options mentioned in the site's own questions and answers. SIM-only is where the short commitments live: of the 72 plans listed, nine run for a single month, 45 for twelve and 18 for twenty-four. The cheapest is £6 a month for 10GB from iD Mobile on a one-month rolling plan; Vodafone's entry point is £7 a month for 16GB over twelve months. Set those against Ofcom's pricing research, published 26 February 2026, which put average pay-monthly SIM-only spend at about £18 a month in the second quarter of 2025 and average in-bundle spend at £14.59, and notes that between 2020 and 2025 average data use more than doubled while what people paid for it fell by 20%.

Read the listings closely and some of them step up part-way through. One reads “£25.99…Increasing to £29.59”, a £3.60 jump written into the deal from the start. That is the shape a mobile price rise has to take now, and it is a real improvement on what came before. Promotions move quickly here too: several iPhone tariffs carried a “Double Data! Was 100GB” flash, with the site's own footnote dating the underlying 100GB tariffs to the window between 22 June 2026 and 22 July 2026. A price seen one week is not guaranteed the next, so the sensible move is to check the monthly figure, the up-front figure and the stepped figure together before committing to twenty-four months of anything.

From 531 shops to one website

Companies House keeps the clearest record of what happened to this business, and it is more interesting than the marketing. Company 02142673 was incorporated on 26 June 1987 as Notchwave Limited, became Professional Cellular Services Limited on 3 April 1989, took the name The Carphone Warehouse Limited on 22 January 1991, and became Currys Retail Limited on 4 October 2021. It is still active, still registered at Currys Newark Campus, Long Hollow Way, Newark NG24 2NH, and still filed under SIC codes 47421 for retail sale of mobile telephones and 61900 for other telecommunications activities. Its last accounts were made up to 3 May 2025 with the next set due by 31 January 2027, and its most recent confirmation statement is dated 19 August 2026.

The parent changed name in the same season. Dixons Carphone plc was renamed Currys plc on 15 September 2021, with the stock market ticker switching to CURY from 8am the following morning. The year before that, in March 2020, the group announced it was closing every one of its 531 standalone Carphone Warehouse shops, putting around 2,900 jobs at risk. O2 pulled out of its retail agreement that same month; BT-owned EE followed in September 2020, saying it had “taken the hard decision to not renew our EE Mobile contract with Dixons Carphone, and shift our focus and investment to growth in our own stores and online channels.”

The retailer's own explanation for the shrunken line-up is that it is “moving to a new, more flexible and transparent mobile offer that will give customers better value”. Existing O2 and EE customers were told there would be “no change to your package or service or the prices and duration of your current deal”, only that upgrades would have to be arranged with the network directly. Anyone still holding one of those contracts should treat the network, not this site, as their point of contact from here on.

Three network brands, and the company they all now sit inside

On the pay-monthly pages the choice is Vodafone, showing 110 deals, and iD Mobile, showing 139. On SIM-only there are three names across 72 plans: Vodafone with 46, iD Mobile with 22 and VOXI with four. VOXI is Vodafone's own younger-audience brand. iD Mobile is Currys' own network, and its help pages say outright that “Three UK – the network partner of iD Mobile – merged with Vodafone UK to create a new company, VodafoneThree”.

That merger completed on 31 May 2025, with Vodafone taking 51% and CK Hutchison Group Telecom Holdings 49%, and a commitment to invest £11 billion over ten years, £1.3 billion of capital expenditure in the first year alone, and cost and capital synergies of £700 million a year by the fifth year. On 5 May 2026 Vodafone agreed to buy out the remaining 49% for £4.3 billion, or €4.9 billion, with completion expected in the second half of 2026. For a customer, the practical upshot is the one iD Mobile describes on its own site: “your phone will now connect to both Vodafone and Three, automatically switching to the strongest signal”, with around 600 sites already upgraded and 9,000 more planned by June 2026.

Coverage is measured independently, and the numbers are worth carrying into any handset decision. Ofcom's Connected Nations spring update, published 13 May 2026, put 5G coverage outside premises between 76% and 94% depending on the operator, with coverage from all operators at once rising from 47% to 64%. Standalone 5G, the newer build that does not lean on a 4G core, ranges from 49% to 85% across the three operators that have deployed it, up from a 47% to 65% spread in July 2025. On 4G, every operator reaches at least 99% of UK premises outdoors, 84% of the UK landmass has good coverage from all operators and 96% from at least one. A network's brand name matters far less than whether its masts reach your street, and the coverage checker is the only way to settle that.

The rules that changed what a phone deal is allowed to say

Two Ofcom decisions have quietly done more for handset buyers than any retailer promotion. The first is the ban on inflation-linked mid-contract price rises, set out in a statement dated 19 July 2024 and applying to new contracts from 17 January 2025. Percentage-based and inflation-linked increase terms are prohibited; any rise “will need to be set out in pounds and pence, prominently and transparently, at the point of sale”, and providers have to be clear about when it happens. Ofcom's own research explains why it bothered: around six in ten broadband and mobile customers were on inflation-linked contracts as at April 2024, 58% of pay-monthly mobile customers did not know what CPI and RPI measure, and only 12% were both aware of a rise and able to identify it as inflation-linked.

That rule is the reason a listing here reads “£25.99…Increasing to £29.59” rather than quoting a formula. It also gives a shopper a straightforward test: add the stepped figure to the months it will apply for, and compare the real total against a SIM-only plan plus a phone bought outright. iD Mobile advertises “great value SIM only plans with no annual price rises”, which is a claim worth checking against the contract summary before signing rather than after.

The second decision is older and just as useful. Since 17 December 2021 mobile companies have been banned from selling network-locked handsets. Ofcom found that more than a third of people who decided against switching said having to unlock a handset put them off, that almost half of those who tried to unlock a phone ran into difficulty, and that unlocking cost around £10. A phone bought here can be moved to another network at the end of its term without asking anyone's permission, which is the single biggest lever a customer has over the price they pay in year three.

Insurance, credit and the paperwork behind the sale

Buy online and the Consumer Contracts rules give 14 calendar days to change your mind, running from the day after the goods arrive for products and from the start of the contract for services, with a further 14 days to send the goods back “complete (with any accessories, leads or other items provided)”. The terms reserve the right to “charge you for the value of any Goods returned which have been used or damaged whilst in your possession, up to the full cost price”, so unwrapping and using a phone for a fortnight is not a free trial. Separately, section 22 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives 30 days from the day after delivery to reject goods that are faulty, and states that an agreement shortening that window “is not binding on the consumer”, though a trader may agree to extend it.

The airtime side is not the retailer's contract. The terms refer throughout to a “Network Operator” and a “Network Contract”, so the monthly service agreement is with Vodafone, VOXI or iD Mobile, and a service dispute that cannot be resolved goes to the network's own complaints process and then to its approved alternative dispute resolution scheme. Currys handles the sale, and its complaints page splits the routes three ways: care and repair on 0344 561 1234, escalating to Consumer Arbitration, run by Consumer Dispute Resolution Limited at 12–14 Walker Avenue, Milton Keynes MK12 5TW; insurance on 0800 049 0221, with an update promised within 14 working days and escalation to the Financial Ombudsman Service; and credit plans on 0330 678 0511, also escalating to the Ombudsman. Every route opens once a final response arrives or eight weeks have passed. Currys Group Limited is an authorised credit broker regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority; care and repair and instant replacement products sit outside that regulation, which the site says itself.

Add-on insurance is sold alongside the handsets. Mobile Insurance Complete starts at £5 a month and Mobile Insurance Lite at £3, both covering accessories up to £300, with no excess on a breakdown claim and an excess on damage, theft and loss set out on the certificate rather than in the pre-sale document. Cover excludes “theft or loss that happens whilst the user has deliberately left the mobile unattended and unsecured”. Refurbished handsets are graded Excellent, Very Good and Fair, come with a 12-month Currys technical guarantee, and are promised a battery “retaining at least 80% capacity”, with monthly prices from £11.99 for an iPhone SE 3rd generation up to £32.99 for a refurbished iPhone 17.

Where the promise of the widest range runs out

The home page's own words are “Unbeatable prices on contract phones compared across the widest range of networks.” Count the networks and the claim gets hard to stand up. Handsets come on Vodafone or iD Mobile. SIM cards add VOXI, which is Vodafone's brand. iD Mobile is Currys' own operation running on Three's network, and Three and Vodafone have been the same company since 31 May 2025. So the range is three retail brands sitting inside one mobile network group, one of which the seller owns. EE, O2, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile and giffgaff are all absent.

Comparative claims are not a free-for-all in UK advertising. CAP Code rule 3.34 requires comparisons with identifiable competitors to “objectively compare one or more material, relevant, verifiable and representative feature of those products”, and the guidance asks advertisers to signpost how a reader can check. The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against Vodafone in 2021 over “The UK's Best Network”, partly because the verification information was buried at the foot of the page. Nothing on the Carphone Warehouse home page explains what “widest” is measured against.

The house-brand tilt shows up in the stock as well as the wording. Among refurbished handsets, 30 devices are listed on iD Mobile against three on Vodafone. That is a strong steer towards the network Currys owns, and Ofcom's complaints data does not obviously reward it: in the quarter from January to March 2026, published on 30 July 2026, iD Mobile drew 3 pay-monthly complaints per 100,000 customers alongside O2, against an industry average of 2, with EE, giffgaff and Vodafone on 1 and Three and Tesco Mobile on 2. Ofcom notes the gaps here are under one complaint per 100,000 and the figures should be treated as comparable, so this is a nudge rather than an indictment — but two of the three best-scoring providers are not sold here at all.

Two smaller things a careful shopper will notice. The copyright line in the footer reads “©1995-2024 Currys PLC”, two years out of date on a site that changes its prices weekly. And the mobile insurance product information document served publicly, reference ZZVMIPIDMOBCOMP0323 and dated March 2023, states that policies “are underwritten by Aviva Insurance Limited” under firm reference 202153, while the current pages name Chubb European Group SE, firm reference 820988, as the insurer. Both statements come from Currys, the underwriter plainly changed at some point, and a shopper reading the linked document would take away the wrong insurer's name. Ask which company is on the certificate before paying for the cover.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 4 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.