Voxi review: The new king of no-frills mobile

Voxi made an auspicious debut in last year’s Expert Reviews Mobile Network Awards, winning the award for reliability and scoring highly for speed, value and customer service, too. This year’s awards are a triumph for the no-frills network, with more wins than any of its rivals and some close calls in the other categories. Not only does Voxi take home the prizes for value and reliability, but also the overall Best Mobile Network award. Rivals Smarty and Giffgaff aren’t far behind, but with its cheap deals and unlimited video, music and social perks, Voxi appears to be doing a fantastic job of winning customers and keeping them happy.

In fact, Voxi’s customer satisfaction scores speak for themselves: when asked if they would recommend the network, nearly 59% said they were very likely to and another 33% said they were fairly likely. Of all the networks in this year’s survey, only Smarty posted similar results.

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Voxi review: What do you get?

Voxi offers cut-price recurring plans without any long-term commitments and, while these aren’t quite as cheap as similar packages from Giffgaff, Smarty and Lebara, they’re hard to quibble with on value for money.

For one thing, Voxi frequently does double- and even triple-data deals. For instance, at the time of writing, you can have 30GB, instead of the usual 15GB, for £10 per month, or 90GB instead of the regular 30GB for only £15 a month. If that wasn’t enticing enough, Voxi provides free data, outside your allowance, for certain activities. On the cheapest £10 deal, you get free data to use with the major social media services, but on the £12/20GB plan, you get free data for music streaming. Move up to the £15/£30GB plan, and free data for video streaming could be yours as well. It’s a great way to get the data you need for entertainment without spending big on an Unlimited plan.

Voxi offers an Unlimited plan, of course, but at £30 it’s a little more expensive, particularly when Smarty, Lebara and iD Mobile all sell Unlimited plans for less.

Voxi doesn’t go big on selling smartphones, but you can still get some of the latest, most desirable handsets bundled in with a Voxi plan. You effectively buy the phone on an interest-free loan from PayPal Credit, so you’re not getting any major savings on the usual price. All the same, you’re not paying over the odds either, with the prices very similar to what you’d find at Amazon or Carphone Warehouse. As a result, Voxi might be worth looking at if you’re after a new smartphone on a 30-month payment plan.

Simplicity is a Voxi strength, and it doesn’t offer any rollover or family-sharing features. Still, you’re free to change, pause or cancel your Voxi plan at any time, though any phone credit plan will be a different story. Value for money is its biggest plus point: Nearly 97% of the users we surveyed said they were satisfied with the network’s value for money, with 68% very satisfied. Despite stiff competition from Smarty, these results won Voxi our Best Value award.

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Voxi review: Customer service

Although it didn’t win any awards in this category, Voxi’s scores for customer service are above the average: over 62% of users said they were satisfied on this point, with only 3% dissatisfied. While this wasn’t enough to put it in contention with Tesco Mobile and Sky Mobile, it’s a similar result to Smarty’s and beats many of the bigger, more established networks.

Ofcom doesn’t currently publish any customer service or satisfaction scores for Voxi, but that should change as the network grows.

Voxi review: Coverage, reliability and speed

Voxi is a virtual network backed by Vodafone and running on its parent company’s core network. This is currently the third-fastest of the UK’s four major networks, according to RootMetrics’ research, with a median download speed of 29.4Mbits/sec, just below Three with 34.7Mbits/sec. That’s not a bad speed by any means, and it’s likely to be boosted further as Vodafone rolls out its 5G services across the UK. In the last round of RootMetrics testing, Vodafone reached median 5G download speeds of over 100Mbits/sec in 15 out of the 16 cities where RootMetrics conducts tests, and coverage had improved in all of them.

Users seem impressed with Voxi’s speed and reliability, giving the network high scores in our Mobile Network Awards survey. Over 86% of users told us they were satisfied with the strength of their signal, while nearly 89% of them told us they often or always had fast enough speeds to browse the web. 85% said the same about streaming audio, and over 66% had no issues streaming video – the area where many other networks still fall short.

These results were the highest for any network, leading to a win in the Reliability category. Smarty and Giffgaff scored higher for 5G performance, with 77% and 70% of their respective 5G customers satisfied with their enhanced speeds. Still, Voxi’s 66% isn’t to be sniffed at, and puts it ahead of most of the rest of the competition, except for Sky Mobile (68%) and iD Mobile (67%).

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Voxi review: Roaming

If there’s one area where Voxi is a little disappointing, it’s in its provisions for roaming. There’s no free roaming, so you need to buy a European Roaming Pass for EU travel, costing £2.25 for one day, £4 for two days, £10 for eight days or £15 for £15 days. This covers you for unlimited texts and minutes, and either your inclusive data or a maximum of 20GB.

Outside the EU, there are 8-day and 15-day Global Roaming Extra passes, costing you either £15 or £25 for 100 minutes and 100 texts, or 200 minutes and 200 texts, plus 2GB or 4GB of data. These cover 73 countries, including a wide range of popular destinations, such as Australia and the USA. Otherwise, charges are generally around 60p to £1.56 per minute, 60p per text and £1.20 per MB.

Voxi review: Other features, services and spending caps

Voxi’s extras stop with its unlimited streaming and social media features, and there’s no spending cap as such. Instead, should you run through your allowance you won’t be able to use any more data until your plan refreshes, or you splash out an extra £3 to get 1GB more. It’s worth bearing in mind that the free unlimited video streaming and social media features don’t work unless you have some data allowance remaining, and there’s no facility to refresh your allowance early.

Voxi review: Verdict

Voxi isn’t the cheapest of the no-frills network, nor is it the fastest, but the combination of affordable plans, great offers and unlimited streaming features makes it excellent value. That wouldn’t matter if the speeds, reliability or customer service weren’t up to scratch, but Voxi’s users tell us that they are. That pushes customer satisfaction through the roof and garners Voxi a trio of awards, including the overall Best Mobile Network award. It’s the new no-frills network to beat.

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