Last year, our average monthly mobile phone bill was £31.45. This year the credit crunch is biting, and we have reduced that figure by 14.6%, to £26.87.

Yet more than one in six of us with monthly accounts still intend to switch phone providers. Either we want to save yet more money, or else some of us are less than best pleased with the service we receive.

And, if J D Power & Associates are to be believed, you are more likely to change providers should you happen to be with 3 than you would were you with Virgin Mobile.

Having interviewed 3,325 mobile phone customers throughout the United Kingdom during March and April, the marketing information services company found that Virgin Mobile achieved a 72% customer satisfaction rating compared to 64% for 3.

That may not be a substantial difference, but it could be significant.

The only other provider rated higher than the industry average of 68% was O2, who scored 70%. Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone could all only manage 67%.

Amongst pre-pay customers the positions of O2 and Virgin Mobile were reversed. Here the industry average customer satisfaction score was marginally below 69%, with Virgin Mobile scoring fractionally better than the average. By comparison O2 achieved 73%.

However Virgin were pushed in to third place by Tesco Mobile on 71%.

Noticeably 3 were once again bottom of this heap, managing only 66%, while the results for T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange were all around the 67% mark.

Unlike monthly account holders though, pre-pay customers are still continuing to spend much the same as they did last year on their mobiles, with expenditure for each averaging £12.09 every month.

They are also less likely to be thinking of changing their phone provider, with fewer than one in eight saying they intend to switch.

But one common area of dissatisfaction identified by the research remains the cost incurred by both pre-pay and account holders when using their phones overseas.

Given that monthly account holders claim to have spent an average of £27.10 on the last occasion they used their mobiles abroad, while pre-pay customers averaged £13.98, this is hardly surprising. For both categories of customer, the cost was more than their average spend for an entire month in the UK.

This is the twelfth year the survey has been conducted, and for the last three of those years Virgin have come top of the pay-monthly segment.

As Stuart Crawford-Browne, senior manager of service industries at J D Power and Associates said, “Providers that take care of their customers with ease of use, good value and loyalty incentives are more likely to prevail in this difficult economic environment - not only maintaining their core business but likely increasing business through loyalty and recommendations as well."

Needless to say, that is at one connection any phone company should really be able to make.