There is a new mobile communications provider in Guyana, after the Prime Minister Mark Phillips presented a licence to an operator called, confusingly enough, Green Gibraltar late last week.
According to local news service Stabroek News, a release from Phillips’ office said that he was happy to welcome the local company and that it was his hope that the increased competition in the local telecommunications sector resulted in better quality service to Guyanese.
The directors of the company have said that the company will now work on its rollout plan and will make a public statement soon. However, reports have said that the government has still not explained how it came to consider Green Gibraltar for this licence.
According to TeleGeography's CommsUpdate the new operator is 100% Guyanese owned and also uses the GG Cell name. It is apparently planning to offer 5G services in seven of Guyana’s ten regions.
The majority of these are coastal areas with a larger population, though it will also provide services in two more sparsely populated regions. It has not applied to operate in the remaining three regions given their very small and remote populations.
As we reported in November last year, Green Gibraltar claimed at the time to have received regulatory clearance to offer 5G mobile services, though this seems to have been premature.
Although the 2016 Telecommunications Act (brought into force in 2020) set out a framework for enabling competition across all segments of the telecommunications sector in Guyana, the mobile market has been open to competition since 2001. Until today, however, only GTT+ and Digicel Guyana serve the country’s population of just under 800,000.
