Enabling personalised shared mobile phone usage within a wireless telecommunications network, including an illustrative application of the invention as it relates to mobile subscribers who cannot afford a mobile phone handset in the emerging markets developing countries or poor regions. For instance, a prepaid wireless subscriber can be provisioned on a wireless network without the need for a mobile phone handset or SIM but with a personal phone number. The subscriber may access his account and invoke the system by keying in an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) short code followed by his account number on a borrowed handset to access a personalised menu sent from the system over the network. Key features of the disclosure are the very low cost of entry and the ability for a subscriber to access the system from any GSM MAP2+ handsets without the need for any modification or downloading of applications.