Yus wrote:

"FYI, I used Google.Com to look at the nos we discussed and this is the dealie;

Gamcel had 3700 subscribers in 1998 and this number jumped to 5,300 in 1999.

Now, three years later, you want to tell me that in just over 2 years, this cellular service picked up approximately 30,000 new subscribers? The growth rate in subscriber levels between 1998 and 1999 certainly does not justify the nos you and Gassama are spouting here.

To conclude, I think I have a hunch of where Gassama came up with these nos. In his 2002 budget speech, Famara Jatta said that Gamcel is making plans to expand its services to accommodate 30,000 users. This of course, does not mean that Gamcel has 35,000 subscribers."

Yus,

The use of Google.com to try to verify the figures I posted on the L concerning the number of GSM mobile phones in The Gambia is absolutely futile.

The figures you came up with are not only in incorrect but do not apply to the GSM in service in the country. Gamcel's GSM service came into operation in May of last year. Prior to that we had a TACS mobile system by Motorola and an embargo on newline connections were effectively put in place for a good three years prior to the commissioning of the new GSM service.

It may interest you to know that I was the Gamtel counterpart engineer during the instalation of the old Tacs mobile phone service and was responsible of its maintenace prior to moving to the local network section and later to the planning section as a senior Engineer. That was in 1992.

It may also interest you to know that I have been involved in the setting of the new GSM service, which is a subsdiary of Gamtel, right from the onset.

For your information, we had anticipated a demand of ten to fifteen thousand customers when we launched it in May of last year. However we were overwhelmed by the unprecedented demand. Gamcel had put in service more than fiften thousand customers in under ten weeks of operations alone!

Since I did not know Africell's customer base, I only guessed that they may have connected between 15,000 and 20,000 customers since coming into operations a few months back.