Carphone Warehouse yesterday said it would take on the American market with the "rapid roll-out" of its partnership with US retailer Best Buy.
The mobile phone group said it hoped for between 150 and 200 stores, the majority of which will be "store within a store" concepts in existing Best Buy locations.
In a strategy update, Carphone Warehouse said a five-month US trial had produced "encouraging" results, and that it would now open between 150-200 outlets in existing Best Buy stores before the end of 2008.
Finance director Roger Taylor said the US handset market, which is dominated by the mobile networks' own brand outlets, is crying out for more independent retailers.
"Buying mobile phones in the US is a horrible experience. The network stores are just there to push their own business and there's very little in the way of impartial advice," he said.
Setting out its annual strategy, Carphone added that it was targeting 3.5 million residential broadband customers by March 2010.
It reported a figure of 2.27 million last month, adding that growth prospects have been boosted as more customers move onto unbundled lines, meaning Carphone supplies them directly rather than feeding its service through a BT line.
The TalkTalk service has been mired in controversy after Carphone's offer of free broadband to those customers paying £20 a month for a landline phone resulted in a major decline in customer service standards.
Carphone said last month that it continued to invest in improving customer service, while also benefiting from further unbundling of BT exchanges.
However, chief executive Charles Dunstone was quoted as saying that it may be until October before it clears a backlog of 260,000 loss-making free broadband customers.
Carphone makes an estimated loss of £5 per TalkTalk customer per month while they get their broadband service through wholesale products from BT.
