If you have plans to study overseas, avoid signing contracts with the local telcos. This means, no new mobile phones at low prices. It would really make things a lot easier to suspend your phone line when you are not bound by contracts.
I, very unwittingly, signed a 2-year contract with Singtel last May and got my Samsung at a really affordable price. But cancellation or suspension of phone line while under contract costs $400. For a 6-month period, my subscription cost would at most be $192, so it doesn’t make sense to cancel the line. The best way is to cancel as many additional services as possible, so you pay less.
Things that you can cancel are Dataplan, Caller ID, Auto-roaming, Color-me-tones (if you use them) etc. I never understood why people would pay for Color-me-tones. It doesn’t make much money sense to me. But i digress.
There’s good news though. Singtel actually allows you to suspend your line for free even while under contract provided you’re there to study. I’m not so sure about other circumstances. But the troublesome part is that you’d have to photocopy a letter of acceptance to show them that you are indeed going to study.
But before you go drug-high on suspending your phone line, you may wanna consider if you need it for your UOB Internet Banking. Of course, all is not lost in this case. You can still suspend your line, but make sure you get your OTP service switched to a token before you do that. It takes them 14 working days (that’s almost 3 weeks) to get the token mailed to your place and upon reception, you are required to sign an acknowledgment form and either mail it to them or personally bring it down to your UOB branch. Only then, is your token activated for use. so do what you have to early.
hi, going away to study and found this post really helpful! need to suspend my singtel line and thanks for the timely reminder that i might need the line for uob internet banking. wouldn’t have drawn the connection otherwise. good luck!
Glad this helped! =)
hi! I would just like to ask how did you manage to suspend your singtel line? cos I went to some singtel shop to ask today and they told me that I still have to pay the termination charges :S I’m also going to UK to study in late Sept!
Hi Rachel,
I’m not sure if there’s a maximum period you are allowed to suspend your line for but when I called the helpline, I was told to bring proof of my studying overseas to suspend the line for a period of a year. Or, like what you were told, pay a termination fee of $400. The thing was, my bill was only around $30 a month and I only had like 6 months more of contract. That would only come up to $180 and then I would be able to terminate it without incurring additional fees, so I didn’t suspend it in the end. You might want to call the helpline to find out again.
I need to suspense my line for 5 months as I’m travelling overseas to study for 4 months. Singtel wanted to charged me 5$ per month for suspending for 5 months. After reading your post, I decided to ask for a waiver from them. Hopefully it works. Thanks!
Hi, did any of you manage to get Singtel to waive the $5 monthly charge? I will be going on exchange but when I call in, then customer service officer insist on the $5 charge.
No they insisted that I must pay the $5. You still need to pay another fee to reactivate your line in the future 🙁
Aw, that sucks.
I didn’t actually suspend it without the charge eventually so I can’t say for sure that the lady who told me I could be waived from the fee didn’t make a mistake. Or it could’ve been that they had a change of policy.
Thanks guys. I emailed in too and another customer service officer called back with the same response. Guess they no longer have this policy in place.