Carphone Warehouse Fresh Freedom Review

Overall Rating

Calls charged at 10p per minute on Fresh Freedom so no higher rate calls for first few minutes each day.

Semi Contract allowing full Call Waiting and Call diversion.

Possible to go into negative balance,
Calls charged per minute - so a short call e.g. 10 seconds will be charged at 10p,
Alternative tariff charges 15p for first minute of EACH call then 5p so is not economical if making several short calls.

At first glance, Fresh Freedom network from The Carphone Warehouse would appear to offer the ideal mobile phone package and seems to be an alternative to Pay As You Go
However the system has fatal flaws when trying to ascertain how much balance you have remaining. You call a free phone number which in turn sends the balance back as a text message. All good you might think until you discover that this balance information is not at all accurate - Fresh are a Virtual Network piggybacking on the T-Mobile system.

Customer Service say that it is not accurate as they are only able to include calls that the network has told them about due to the fact that they are a "Virtual Network" Funny that considering that Virgin Mobile are a "Virtual Network" but are able to give an accurate balance and also tell you the cost of the last call moments after it has been made.

Recently the balance info service has been failing to send the balance and the only way to tell how much credit you have etc is to phone customer service, however this call is charged at the standard rate and the service seemingly staffed by Carphone Warehouse's own brand of Zombie.

Overall the network and Carphone Warehouse needs a lot of improvement if they are to be a serious challenger in the mobile phone marketplace.

Members' Comments onhyderpete.'s Review

• Max. on 8th Nov 2002

  I have found this the cheapest network of all for my particular usage. If you set your account to direct debit, your phone is in constant credit. All the ups of a contract without any of the ties.

• Ikey Baby. on 14th Nov 2002

  The review was informative however, to presume that Woolworth's staff were "job centre rejects who can barely tell the time" was an unnecessary and disappointing comment

• MonkeyMan. on 4th Dec 2002

  I have found that the staff in my Woolworths stores are articulate, knowledgable and generally of graduate calibre including PHD students. It's a shame that some of these reviewers are so backward... close minded ignorant fools, you should be working in McDonalds.

• coheritie. on 6th Dec 2002

  I had and fresh sim card on my phone, yes it has a right rate but I as student don't have money to top up my phone every week or may be every month an now they've disconnected my phone.