EMBRATEL

ISP & telecomvendors & products

Empresa Brasileira de Telecomunicações: Brazil's long-distance and data carrier, created in 1965 and folded into the Telebrás system; ran the country's first commercial internet trial in December 1994; privatized in 1998 to MCI WorldCom, sold to Telmex in 2004, incorporated into Claro in 2015.

The backbone company - long distance, international, and the first commercial internet on-ramp.

Embratel was created in the 1960s to build what Brazil did not have: long distance and international connectivity across a country of continental size, where linking two cities was a national infrastructure project rather than a commercial decision. Satellite earth stations, microwave chains and eventually fibre were all its work.

Its second life is the one that matters to this site. When commercial internet arrived in Brazil in the mid-1990s, Embratel operated the backbone it ran on and was the on-ramp through which the country connected to the rest of the network. The academic connection through FAPESP had carried Brazil's traffic until then; the commercial era began on Embratel's circuits.

That sequence, a state company building the physical plant over decades and a commercial internet arriving to use it, is the pattern almost everywhere. The infrastructure is expensive, slow to build, and unattractive to private capital until it already exists, at which point it looks obvious. Reading the history in that order makes the privatization debates of the 1990s more legible: what was being sold had been built by an entity that could afford to be patient.

Also known as: Empresa Brasileira de Telecomunicações

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