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Vendor lineage

CPqD

The state research centre that survived the privatisation of the state.

Telebrás created the Centro de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento em Telecomunicações in 1976, in Campinas, with a brief that was explicitly industrial rather than academic: develop domestic telecommunications technology so that Brazil bought less of it from abroad. When the Telebrás system was broken up and sold in 1998, CPqD did not go with it. It became an independent foundation and is still operating.

The brief is what makes it unusual. A great many countries have run state telecommunications monopolies. Rather fewer built a research institute inside one and told it to produce technology rather than papers. CPqD worked on switching systems, transmission, network management and digital telephony, at a time when every one of those was imported, and it did so on behalf of an operator that could guarantee it a customer - which is a structural advantage no independent laboratory has.

Then the customer was dismantled. The 1998 privatisation split the Telebrás system into twelve holdings sold to different owners, and an in-house research centre serving a monopoly has no obvious place in that arrangement. CPqD was converted into an independent private foundation, and had to find work from operators that were now competitors of one another, and from government.

That transition is the part worth studying. An institution built to serve one guaranteed customer had to learn to sell, and most such institutions do not survive the lesson. This one has been going for close to five decades in total and around three of them without the parent that created it.

It remains a research and development organisation rather than a vendor: telecommunications, energy, digital government, and the certification and testing work that a country needs somebody neutral to do. Neutrality is what makes it useful. CPqD is useful to competing operators for the same reason a carrier-neutral exchange is useful to competing carriers, and for the same reason a vendor-neutral certification is worth more than a vendor's own - because it belongs to none of them.

It also trains, which is why it carries that tag here: a research institute in a country that imports most of its technology is one of the few places domestic expertise is deliberately manufactured rather than hired.

Founding stories

1976

Centro de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento da Telebrás

Campinas, São Paulo · Founders: Telebrás, Ministério das Comunicações

Approved by the Telebrás board on 31 August with a stated purpose that is unusually explicit in the record: autonomia tecnológica, technological autonomy for the country in telecommunications. It began in a downtown office, then borrowed space from Embratel, and occupied five locations before land was bought in 1980 for the campus it still uses.

The timeline

  1. A campus of its own

    Land acquired for what became the Pólis de Tecnologia - 360,000 square metres, of which around 55,000 are built. The scale is a statement about how long the project was expected to run.

  2. Independent six days before the parent was sold

    CPqD became a private-law foundation on 23 July under the Lei Geral das Telecomunicações. The Telebrás auction took place on 29 July. The research capability was deliberately detached before the thing that funded it was broken up and sold, which is a decision somebody had to make on purpose.

Flagship products and solutions

  • Trópico digital switchingBrazilian-designed telephone exchanges, developed here and manufactured by industry - the single largest undertaking of the pre-privatisation era and the reason the brief existed.
  • The inductive-card payphoneThe card and the telephone that took it, used by essentially everybody in Brazil for a decade. It is the piece of this institution's work that the largest number of people physically touched, and almost nobody knew where it came from.
  • Optical componentsOptical fibre, semiconductor lasers and optical transmission equipment - the technologies that later spun out as Padtec and BrPhotonics rather than remaining research.
  • Operations and business support systemsThe software an operator runs on: provisioning, billing, network management. Unglamorous, enormous, and the part most likely to be imported if nobody local builds it.
  • Testing and certificationConformance and interoperability evaluation, and participation in the Brazilian digital television standard - work that produces documents rather than devices.

Key innovations

  • Develop here, manufacture thereThe model was explicit: CPqD did applied research, coordinated basic research with universities, built prototypes, and then transferred the technology to companies that manufactured and sold it. The institute never became a factory. That separation is what let a state research centre produce commercial products without becoming a state manufacturer, and it is the mechanism behind the industrial brief the entry above describes.
  • Spinning out rather than holding onPadtec in optical transmission, Trópico in switching, BrPhotonics in photonics and a dozen others emerged from work done here and are collectively called the CPqD universe. An institution that measures itself by what leaves it is structured very differently from one that measures itself by what it retains.
  • Technological autonomy as an engineering programmeImport substitution is usually a trade policy. Here it was a research agenda with deliverables - switching, transmission, fibre, lasers - each chosen because the country was buying it from abroad. Whether the policy succeeded is argued elsewhere on this timeline; what is not in doubt is that somebody wrote down which technologies mattered and then built them.
  • Counting the output in registrationsIt became the largest depositor of software registrations in Brazil and the second-largest non-academic filer of patent applications. For an institution whose products belong to other companies, the intellectual property record is the only honest measure of what it produced.

Main markets

Telecommunications operators, energy utilities, financial institutions, government and defence - the customers who need technology built for local conditions and regulation, and who cannot simply buy a product designed for another market.

It sells research, development and certification rather than products, which places it against consultancies and university laboratories rather than against vendors. Its distinguishing asset is that it has been doing this in one country's telecommunications sector for fifty years and remembers what was tried before.

Analyst standing

  • Its research programme is described as the largest of its kind in information and communications technology in Latin America, and the campus is part of the São Paulo state technology park system.
  • The measure worth applying is unusual: an institution created to serve a monopoly outlived the monopoly by nearly three decades, and did so by selling to the companies the monopoly was broken into. Very little of the Telebrás system survives under its own name. The part that did was the part that was not sold.
CPqD ↗
From the company
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