The 2021 Uswitch Awards

It’s that time of year again, where we dish out awards to the best in telecoms and celebrate the providers, phones, and brands that did the most for consumers and the mobiles industry in the 2021 Uswitch Awards.

2020 saw some great phones released, and some fantastic deals and incentives from the networks. As is customary, we’ve handed out awards in all sorts of categories, including best network and the handset of the year, as well as prizes for fastest network, best roaming, most popular network and more.

This year’s Mobile Network of the Year award went to giffgaff, a well deserved victory thanks to its no-contract deals, flexible plans and great customer service.

While giffgaff scooped one of the top prizes, Three was perhaps the biggest winner overall with four awards - Best Network for Data, Best Network for Roaming, Most Popular Mobile Network and Best SIM only Network.

Sky Mobile, last year’s Network of the Year, bagged a brace of awards this time with Best Value Pay Monthly Network and Best Pay Monthly Network, a testament to its continued excellent service to consumers.

O2 retained the title of Best Network for Coverage, taking home the trophy for the second year in a row and really cementing its claim as the network that covers the most consumers around the country,

EE also kept an award from last year and ran away with the Fastest Mobile Network award. As always, this is verified by the mobile data specialists at Opensignal.

Best Pay-As-You-Go Network and Best Value SIM only Network went to SMARTY and Lebara respectively.

New award winners this year included Asda Mobile, which claimed its first ever Uswitch award for Best Network for Customer Service.

In a year where we saw some excellent smartphone releases, one of the heavyweight brands really stood out: Apple. Off the back of its four-phone strong 5G iPhone 12 range, and the earlier release of the 2020 iPhone SE, Manufacturer of the Year went to Apple and Handset of the Year went to the excellent iPhone 12 Pro Max.

But we didn’t leave Samsung out either. It won Telecoms Innovation Award for the impressive Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 5G.

Ernest Doku, telecoms expert here at Uswitch, said: “Over the last year we’ve relied more than ever on our mobile phones for work, entertainment and to keep in touch with our loved ones.”

“giffgaff has won a place in consumers’ hearts with its no-nonsense business model, and it fully deserves its Network of the Year award.”

“Once again Apple has taken home the Handset of the Year award, with the iPhone 12 Pro Max showing off a quality camera, stylish design and 5G for the first time.”

“The absence of one provider sweeping the board at our awards this year shows how competitive the UK mobile market is, and also demonstrates what each network has to offer in the various categories.”

The full list of winners is: