Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) operation has grown very rapidly to become a highly competitive business in the country. The popular network providers in Nigeria are MTN, Globacom (Glo), Airtel and Etisalat now 9mobile. The study investigated the strength of Ego-identity as determinants of university-community preference for GSM service providers in Ondo State, Nigeria. One research question and one hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. This study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population comprised 38,631 undergraduate students, teaching and non-teaching staff of the four universities who were subscribers to the different service providers in Ondo State, Nigeria. Ten percent of the population was sampled, 3,865. Guttman split-half method was used for reliability of the study with r-value of Ego Identity, 0.783. Questionnaires were properly filled and used for analysis. The research questions were analyzed using descriptive statistics, standard deviation and percentage. The hypotheses were tested using Discriminant Function Analysis at .05 level of significance. The results showed that ego identity (Wilks Lambda 0.583 F (3,861) 918.709 P<0, 05) classifying 28.2% of respondent’s preferences. Based on the findings, it was recommended, among others, that the network providers should train and retrain their staff on how to rendered satisfactory services to their customers. The university community should endeavor to subscribe to the network that have high quality in order to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of its members
Keywords: Preference, ego-identity, network providers
