What network does Honest use?

Our Classic SIMs use Three’s network, piggybacking on their masts to give you the UK’s fastest 5G. (Unlike other MVNOs, we’re not owned by Three or any big network.)

Why Three?

We choose Three because their 5G is the fastest, as confirmed by Ookla. They have access to more 5G radio waves than any other network in the UK.

So with Honest, you get ultra-fast downloads, speedy streaming and rapid page load times. 100x faster than 4G 💁

Why don’t you have your own masts?

We’d rather invest in giving you the best mobile experience, than dig up more land to build expensive masts.

Only the big 4 mobile networks own masts in the UK: that’s Three, EE, O2 and Vodafone. All the other networks are piggybacking on them.

How does it work?

Warning: things are about to get geeky.

The big networks rent radio waves from the government. Those radio waves are 3G, 4G or 5G.

To get the most out of 5G, networks need to have a ‘continuous spectrum’ – a block of waves next to each other. The bigger the block, the better the 5G.

Three were quick off the mark, buying a broadband company (Relish) with 5G radio before the other networks were even thinking about 5G.

Now, Three has 140MHz in one block and is three times faster. The other networks have less than 100Mhz, with each of their blocks broken up into smaller chunks. They even wrote to OFCOM to complain about how much better Three’s 5G is. Their loss is your gain 🤷

As much as we're fans of our Classic SIMs, no one network has 100% coverage 100% of the time.

That's why we developed Smart SIM, letting you access 300+ apps on EE, O2, Three & Vodafone and in 180+ countries worldwide for just £10/month.

That's £10/month for boosted UK signal and free global roaming. Not bad, if you ask us 😎

Interested? sign up here