Privatization of State-Owned Telecommunication Company and the Effects of Liberalization on the GSM Sector in the Gambia

As the telecommunications industry is undergoing a drastic transformation whereas the services of traditionally local telecommunications have been provided by a monopoly under certain regulated price structure. Nowadays many developing nations face the pressures and demand for basic telecommunications services. Even though it has a wild gist of reflection on the global trend towards telecommunications deregulation yet it is pushing the international community to modernize national networks. This paper tries to examine the views and opinion of telecommunications privatization and the effects of liberalization in the Gambia. The aspect of privatization is seen as massive demise in state equity-ownership while liberalization on the other hand is recognized as increase in competition in the industry. Privatization of telecommunication is creating exciting new opportunities and new challenges for infrastructure and service providers because the telecom sector is undergoing fundamental changes. This is clear in most countries and the explicit goal of liberalization is to provide quality services to consumers in high cost areas at affordable prices. The increase appreciation of the benefit of competition and the rapid change in technology lately has forced the monopolies to generate powerful forces of deregulation. Privatization and liberalization initiatives were undertaken as a result of the context of structural adjustment programs by IMF and World Bank in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. With this regard we want to see if privatization of Gamtel is ideal and what are the effects of GSM liberalization. In this paper, a sample size of 93 is taken in a survey to represent the population and RStudio package is use for statistical analysis to test three hypotheses. The results shows that privatization is acceptable but competition does not either push prices down or encourage quality of services in the GSM sector in the Gambia.