Vivo

History

The company was originally formed as part of Telebrás, the state-owned telecom monopoly at the time. In 1998, Telebrás was demerged and privatized. Telefónica bought Telesp, the São Paulo division, and rebranded it to Telefónica. On 15 April 2012, all Telefónica services were rebranded again to Vivo, using the same strategy of unifying all its services in a unique brand, like Movistar (Hispanic America and Spain) and O2 (rest of Europe).

Vivo brand

The Vivo brand was launched on 13 April 2003, as a mobile phone service provider. It's the largest provider in Brazil with over 76 million users. It originated from the merger of several Brazilian mobile phone operations under a joint venture owned equally by Portugal Telecom (PT) and Spain's Telefónica. Until 2006, the group was composed of six holding companies which, as announced in November 2005, merged into a single holding company, "Vivo Participações". The operation was concluded on 22 February 2006. In July 2010, Telefónica bought PT's shares.

Today Vivo operates an UMTS, 3G networks and bands 1, 7, 3, 28 4G LTE in most Brazilian cities. Initially, the network was based on analog AMPS (IS-95) and parts (resulting from acquisition of other companies), using TDMA (IS-136). These were all converted to GSM beginning in 2006, when, after years being the only CDMA network. For some years, GSM and CDMA networks coexisted. In the second half of the 2000s, the CDMA network was gradually converted to CDMA2000 in the major cities. The CDMA network was discontinued in November 2012.

In 2012, the fixed services in the state of São Paulo were rebranded from Telefónica to Vivo, unifying the brands for fixed and mobile services since then.