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Carriers

Operators that move somebody else's traffic. The physical substrate everything above them assumes, and the reason several entries here are really about rights of way and undersea cable.

9 companies

1897 - presentMarconi - wireless itself, then the bubbleGuglielmo Marconi bridged the Atlantic in 1901; a century later the company bearing his name became telecom's starkest dot-com cautionary tale, carved up by Ericsson in 2006.vendor

1954 - presentAlgar Telecom - the operator the state never tookBrazilian carrier founded 1954 as CTBC in Uberlandia, and the only one to stay private through nationalisation.

1968 - presentLumen, CenturyLink, Level 3 and Global CrossingA rural Louisiana phone company that ended up owning one of the internet's largest backbones.

1971 - presentHughes - the network where latency is a law of physicsGeostationary satellite: about a quarter of a second each way, and nothing will fix it.vendor

1972 - 1998The Telebrás System (Telebrás, Telesp, Embratel)Nine hundred telephone companies became one, then twelve, then a handful owned elsewhere.standards

1988 - presentOrange - a former state monopoly with a global enterprise armThe other side of the European story: the operator the national champions were built to supply.

1998 - 2009Brasil TelecomOne of the twelve pieces, which spent a decade becoming part of a larger piece again.

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

2002 - presentSpaceX - low orbit, and what it does to the latency floorThe constraint that could not be engineered away was engineered around, by moving the satellites.

All companies, in order