Oi - sixteen companies assembled into one, then unassembled - Brazilian carrier created by the 1998 Telebras privatisation; filed the largest bankruptcy protection in Brazilian history in 2016.

Oi began in 1998 as Tele Norte Leste, one of twelve companies created when the state telecommunications system was broken up and sold. It merged sixteen state-owned local operators covering the north, northeast and southeast, traded as Telemar from 1999, took the Oi name for its mobile service in 2002, and applied it to everything from 2007.

The scale of what was assembled is the part worth holding onto. Sixteen separate state companies, each with its own plant, numbering, staff and operating practice, were merged into a single carrier by a transaction rather than by a plan - and the resulting network is the one much of Brazil still depends on.

In June 2016 it filed for bankruptcy protection of sixty-five billion reais, the largest in Brazilian history. A company assembled by privatisation was taken apart again by the courts, which is a long way from the argument made for the sale in 1998.

It appears throughout this timeline as somebody else’s customer: the carrier whose circuits the integrators on these pages installed, whose backbone the equipment vendors sold into, and whose name shows up in project histories far more often than in accounts of the industry.

Oi ↗

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