Carrier selection with TOPSIS method in telecom sector: A study of carriers representing the region in terms of call volume in the African content

While decision making plays an important role for the realization of managerial success, decision makers try to make the best decisions as possible to meet their goals in the best way possible. It has become very important for decision makers to take the right decision under the increasing competition conditions. One of the most critical goals that organizations want to achieve is to ensure continuity with sustainable success. In order to achieve these goals, resources such as labor, capital, materials should be used efficiently and managerial function performances such as planning, organizing, directing and controlling should be arranged successfully. In order to fulfill these functions, decision makers are faced with a constant decision-making situation. Since decision making has a key role for decision makers today, it is necessary to support this process with scientific methods. Scientific methods require that the results be shared with others, that all calculations, assumptions, data and judgments can be clearly stated and open to criticism, being impartial, and not being tied to people, positions or interests. The telecommunication sector, along with the increasing importance of the rapid spread of data in daily life, has increased its size in economic life at the same rate. Thus, it has become one of the most important sectors that grow the economy. Speaking on a globalized scale, in the integration of less developed countries with foreign countries, a modernized telecommunications infrastructure has become a basic requirement for its long-term growth. The sector provides services to all clusters in the household and business world in various technologies and levels. Another important feature of the telecommunication sector, which is also expressed as the border system of global information economies as an international infrastructure, is that positive developments in the sector affect other sectors positively, that is, they have an accelerating effect. The aim of the research is to determine the place of TOPSIS method, which is one of the multi-criteria decision-making methods, in decision-making methods in the problems where there are multiple alternatives and criteria, and to reveal how effectively and quickly it reaches the decision result in line with the goals of the decision makers. In addition, it is to facilitate the selection of carriers in strategic countries in the African continent, to reach the result with logical data instead of intuitive techniques. The study covers the evaluation of the carriers of a company operating in the telecom sector, which has a significant share in the market, with the AHP-based TOPSIS method, which enables the efficient regulation of traffic flow in ten countries in the African continent. Keywords: Telecommunications, Carrier, Multi-Criteria Decision Making, TOPSIS, AHP, Africa.