iD Mobile review: Excellent value, mediocre customer service | Expert Reviews

iD Mobile review: Customer service

If there’s anywhere that iD Mobile is weak, it’s customer service. Just 17% of customers told us they were very satisfied with iD Mobile here, with an additional 36% fairly satisfied. The 53% total puts it well behind award winners Tesco Mobile (75%) and Sky Mobile (69%), not to mention Voxi, Giffgaff, Smarty and EE.

Ofcom doesn’t currently publish a full set of data for iD Mobile, but its most recent customer service and satisfaction report noted that iD had more complaints per 100,000 subscribers than the average (10 to the average 8), though it had fewer customers with a reason to complain (a mere 4%). While iD Mobile is a long way away from the poor scores of Vodafone and Three, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

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iD Mobile review: Coverage, reliability and speed

iD uses Three’s mobile network, which now covers 99% of the UK population for 4G and 60% for 5G. In terms of UK-wide median download speeds, the latest RootMetrics research places Three a distant second to EE, at 34.7Mbits/sec against EE’s 65.1Mbits/sec. However, its 5G performance in some areas beats that of EE, reaching over 100MBits/sec in all 16 cities where RootMetrics runs its detailed 5G tests, and exceeding 200Mbits/sec in nine of them. Three gives iD Mobile a great platform for 5G services going forward.

If anything, our survey results show iD Mobile beating its host network on signal strength: 76% of respondents counted themselves satisfied with iD’s signal strength, against 68% for Three. However, while iD had more customers consistently getting fast enough connections for Web browsing, the tables were turned when it came to audio and video streaming. Here, iD fell below the average for performance, so it might not be the best option for the most demanding users.

Things are different if you’re in a 5G area: 67% of iD’s 5G users were either very or fairly satisfied with their 5G service, beating O2, Three, Tesco Mobile, Vodafone and Lebara. All the same, the likes of Smarty, Giffgaff and Sky Mobile managed to score even higher for satisfaction, knocking iD out of the running for our 5G award.