About 5,000 mobile-phone subscribers lose their handsets every month. All three mobile-phone operators, SingTel, M1 and StarHub, jointly announced on Monday that they are working together on a system with a common nationwide method of paying for goods and services with mobile phones . Once in place, it will let people pay for their purchases with their mobile phones, regardless of whether they are SingTel, M1 or StarHub subscribers.
Analysts say the legal dispute was unprecedented.
The network's 50,000 customers can swap their CDMA phones for GSM phones. The latest figures from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore show that mobile phone subscribers outnumber paging one by more than four to one. Paging numbers are being deactivated at a rate of 40,000 each month. The charge will be levied only on companies whose customers make toll-free calls, and not at the customer end. This means that payphone users will still pay nothing when they make toll-free calls.