Vendor lineage
Algar Telecom - the operator the state never took
Brazilian carrier founded 1954 as CTBC in Uberlandia, and the only one to stay private through nationalisation.
Algar Telecom was founded in February 1954 in Uberlandia, Minas Gerais, as CTBC, and Alexandrino Garcia took control of it in 1958 to expand beyond the city. It is the only Brazilian telephone operator that remained in private hands when the state took over the sector, and it carries the Algar name from 2013.
That single fact is why it belongs beside Oi on this timeline. When Telebras was created in 1972 and telephony passed to state control, this company did not - and it is still family-controlled seventy years after it started. Oi was assembled out of sixteen state companies by privatisation and filed the largest bankruptcy in Brazilian history; the operator that never entered the state system at all is still operating.
Its origin is unusually specific for a utility. A local businessman in the vehicle trade, faced with a telephone service that did not work, organised the city’s commercial association around fixing it, and the company came out of that. It is a reminder that infrastructure in the interior arrived because somebody local decided it should, rather than because a plan reached them.
The interior is also the whole strategy. It reached eight more cities by 1967, printed the telephone directories itself from 1969, and was the first operator to put cellular service into the interior of Brazil, in 1993 - consistently early in places that national accounts of this industry describe as arriving late.
- Algar Telecom (Wikipedia): founded 15 February 1954 in Uberlandia by Alexandrino Garcia, predecessor CTBC; the only operator that remained private after the creation of Telebras under the military regime; present in nine states and the Federal District
- Meios no Brasil - CTBC incorporated telephone companies in eight cities in 1967, extending its network into Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso do Sul; in 1969 the group founded a printing company for telephone directories; when Telebras was created in 1972 and most operators passed to state control, CTBC kept private control, its concessions being technically fit for integration with the rest of the system; it was the first telecommunications company to deploy cellular technology in the interior of Brazil, in 1993
- Memoria Algar - the company’s own history: Alexandrino Garcia mobilised the Uberlandia commercial association over a crisis in local telephone service, which resulted in the creation of the company in February 1954; he took control of it in 1958 in order to expand beyond Uberlandia
Sources give different expansions of the CTBC acronym - Companhia de Telefones do Brasil Central, Companhia de Telecomunicacoes do Brasil Central and Companhia Telefonica da Borda do Campo all appear. The company’s own history uses the first. The acronym is stable; the expansion is not, and none is asserted here.