ABSTRACT
This chapter examines five telecommunications projects licensed to the private sector during four different governments – the Prem, Chatichai, Chuan, and Anand governments. It analyses the five projects into three major groups determined by the relative role of the bureaucracy as against the political parties in carrying out the projects. The first is the case of a bureaucracy-dominated telephone directory project carried out under Prem. The second group combines three Build-Transfer-Operate projects carried out under Prem, Chatichai, and Chuan I. The last group of cases deals with the three-million-line telephone project, which combined the issues of telecommunications privatization and corruption, the major concerns of both the first and second group of case studies. The mobile phone services typified the politics of telecommunications privatization in which politicians exerted their political influence and interfered in order to facilitate private investments. Mobile telephone projects provided a good example of conflicts and competition among the many interests represented in telecommunications politics.
