Andrew Harrison has a vision. The 37-year-old northerner who runs the 805 Carphone Warehouse stores that dot the nation's high streets reckons he can do for laptops what it has already done for mobile phones: get them into nearly everyone's hands by making them free.

It may sound insane, but it is the reason he remains excited about a business he joined 13 years ago when it had a handful of stores and was run out of a basement on London's Marylebone Road. Now, from his glass-walled office at Carphone's sprawling hangar-like headquarters on an industrial estate in Acton, west London, he recalls the disbelief of his family back in St Helens when he jacked in what looked like a promising consultancy career to join "a bunch of mobile phone cowboys they had never heard of". He cannot help comparing that with the reaction his new plan receives today.

"When I joined, my brother asked me, 'Why would anyone outside of London want a mobile phone?' He said: 'I work in Warrington and I live in Warrington. I have a phone on my desk and a phone at home, and it takes me five minutes to drive between them and if I break down I can walk. Why do I need a phone?' It was seen as this London yuppie thing."

Now Carphone, which secured a place among the top British businesses in joining the FTSE 100 in September, sells over 6.5m phones a year - roughly one in every five in the UK - and there are more handsets in circulation in Britain than there are people.

"Everything that everybody told me about the mobile phone, I can see happening with the laptop," says Harrison. "I get people saying to me 'you will not get a builder on a building site getting a laptop out' and I say 'you would have said the same thing about a mobile phone 10 years ago'."

The catalyst is the great British appetite for broadband internet connections and, more specifically, the drive of Britain's mobile phone companies into broadband on the move. Since last summer all five mobile networks have launched mobile broadband services and prices have halved.

Free laptops

But to get the most out of a mobile broadband service you need a laptop. Once playthings of the rich - or anyone lucky enough to have their company supply one - laptops have plunged in price to such an extent that they are cheaper than some of the so-called high-end feature phones. Customers expect to get phones free when they sign up for an annual or 18-month contract. So why not get a free laptop when you sign up for broadband, asks Harrison.

Carphone's telecoms arm TalkTalk, which Harrison was instrumental in founding when he worked on the firm's strategy, now operates at arm's length to the retail business. It shook up the residential broadband market last year when it started offering free laptops to customers willing to sign up to the AOL service it bought in 2006. TalkTalk has already snaffled a significant share of the 4m-plus laptops sold annually in Britain with just one model. Orange has countered by joining forces with Currys to offer £300 off any laptop to customers signing up for its residential service.

"You fast-forward this three or four years," says Harrison, "and it is a world where no one ever buys a laptop again but just expects it as part of their deal with their broadband provider or part of their monthly fee. They get a laptop and 18 months later they get a new one."

He does not care who starts the ball rolling among the mobile networks but he wants to sell their services when they do. His Carphone stores already flog mobile broadband from all five networks, residential broadband services from Orange and Virgin Media, with O2 to follow shortly, and he would love to stock BT and Sky's kit.

From many in retail or technology this would sound like a pipe dream, but Harrison has a plain-speaking truthfulness about him that lends weight to his argument. He is a foil to the boyish home counties bonhomie of his boss and Carphone co-founder Charles Dunstone, having come from what he terms a "pretty working-class background" in the north-west "where nothing spectacular happened".

Wigan beat Chelsea

What did happen, however, was that he fell in love - with a football team. But in keeping with his generally down-to-earth demeanour, it was not one of the major local clubs such as Liverpool, Everton, Manchester City or United that caught his eye. "My friend Gary came to school one day and he had this strange top on and it was a Wigan Athletic top. I went to my first game with him and I have been a fan for 26 years. I went to reserve games and away games and I have been ridiculed quite systematically for being a supporter of a really rubbish football team."

He has passed his love of Wigan on to his two children - "they think the word Chelsea means boo" - a task made slightly easier when Wigan made it into the Premiership three years ago.

He took a business degree at Leeds University as a way of avoiding the path his father had mapped out for him. His father spent much of his working life as a window cleaner before the pressures of a growing family pushed him into a local factory. Harrison emerged from university in 1992 in the teeth of a recession. He tried finding a job in the area, but ended up in the same factory.

"I worked there for about two months, partly just to work out what my dad had been doing for the past 10 years and partly to earn some money. They made furnace elements. I learned some amazing things, but I realised it was not for me when I went into the mess room with my copy of the Guardian and everyone just looked at me ..."

He moved to London in search of work, scouring local papers and being rejected for management roles by several large employers. He got lucky when a small management consultancy called Bridgewater Business Analysis offered him some project work. "Six months before I had been in the mess room of a factory, and now I was in a boardroom presenting, because we did not have any people. It was the most amazing learning curve."

One of the consultancy's clients was the four-year-old Carphone Warehouse. Its first piece of advice was that the firm should not open any shops, which Dunstone wisely ignored. Harrison ended up doing the firm's weekly accounts and quickly became the expert on all the statistics in the business. Dunstone, with the public schoolboy's love of a nickname, branded him "Stat" after the bespectacled sports pundit Angus "Statto" Loughran. Fed up with paying him a consultant's fee, Carphone's co-founder David "Rosso" Ross hired Harrison in 1995 as strategy manager at a time when Carphone had about 27 stores.

At his fingertips

Colleagues say Harrison has grown with the business. Dunstone moved him into a more commercial role in 1998 and he has climbed the ranks. In 2001 - just after the company floated on the London Stock Exchange - Harrison took over as UK chief executive and two years ago he gained a seat on the board.

Harrison joined Carphone too late to make the hundreds of millions that Dunstone and Ross garnered when it floated, but he has still done very well out of the business. However, his two "nice" cars, a Porsche and a Jaguar, have both been stolen and he is running around in a battered old VW Golf.

The City, meanwhile, will get its latest chance to quiz Harrison about his part of the business on April 15 at Carphone's annual analysts' day, which coincides with the release of its fourth-quarter trading update. Fears are growing that the credit crunch has moved from the financial markets to consumers' pockets. Sony Ericsson and Motorola have both warned of sliding mobile phone sales and industry analysts are forecasting a slowdown this year. Harrison is wary of giving a forecast, but says, "If you look at the figures we put out at Christmas we are still seeing growth and our position since then has been pretty steady." He also believes that Carphone's independence makes it an obvious destination for price-conscious customers. Becoming O2's exclusive retail partner for Apple's iPhone has also helped draw in the crowds.

From his office next to Dunstone, Harrison has clear sight of an electronic board stuck high on the other side of a room bristling with call centre staff that shows how many phones are being sold on an hourly and estimated daily basis, plus how many people are waiting in the credit referrals queue. "Stat" still likes to have all the figures at his fingertips. "When I joined we sold about 2,000 phones a week - now we sell that in an hour, as I can see from the chart. You've got to be on the number every single day. You can't take your eye off it."

CV

Born November 18 1970

Education Rainford High School, St Helens, 1981-1989; University of Leeds, BA management studies 1989-1992

Career

1993-95 Bridgewater Business Analysis

1995 Joined the Carphone Warehouse as strategy manager

1998 Commercial director for the UK

2001 UK chief executive officer

2006 Joined group plc board

Family Married with two boys (aged three and five)

Leisure Wigan Athletic, skiing