Intelig Telecom

» see intelig.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Brazil broke up its state telephone monopoly by licensing a competitor against each surviving piece, and the competitor licensed against Embratel on the long distance network was a consortium nobody in Brazil had heard of. National Grid, which runs the electricity transmission network in England and Wales, held half of it. France Telecom and Sprint held a quarter each. They signed and paid for the concession on 21 January 1999 under the name Bonari Holding, a shell borrowed to get the paperwork done quickly, and the Brazilian trade press reported at the time that a proper name was still being chosen.

On 2 March 1999 the regulator settled the thing that would actually define the company, and it settled it by lottery. Brazilian long distance works on carrier selection codes: you dial two digits before the area code and those digits decide whose network carries the call and whose bill it lands on. Anatel drew the codes. Embratel pulled 21, Tele Norte Leste pulled 31, Telesp pulled 15, and Bonari pulled 23. The company was named Intelig shortly after, but the number was the brand from that morning on.

Voice service opened on 23 January 2000, a year and two days after the concession was signed, and the date was not a coincidence. From then on Intelig scheduled itself around its own number. Data services were promised for 23 July. The third birthday promotion on 23 January 2003 charged 23 centavos a minute, national or international, no distinction. The residential plan launched in September 2009 was called Disque Sempre 23, dial 23 always. National Grid told its shareholders in May 2000 that after four months the company had over 1.2 million customers and about 15 percent of the market it could address, and that figure comes from a half owner describing its own investment, so take it as the shareholder's framing rather than an audited count.

It was expensive from the start. National Grid put 125 million pounds in during that first year and booked 44.1 million as its share of the start-up losses, and group operating profit came in 38.8 million lower, which it blamed mainly on Brazil. By November 2001 the partners had sunk 1.8 billion dollars, and in July 2002 Intelig cut about 200 people, which it called 20 percent of its staff. The network was real and stayed real: 2.8 billion reais since 2000 on roughly 16,000 kilometers of fiber running the length of the country.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the code you dialed ~

Carrier selection on a per-call basis is a regulatory design that turns a brand into a motor habit. Every single long distance call is a fresh decision made with your thumb, and the company that wants the call has to win it again every time, on price, in the half second before you dial the area code.

The logo it used at the end set the word intelig in red and then put 23 beside it in blue, the same size, carrying equal weight. By 2006 local calls had passed long distance to make up 65 percent of its traffic, which tells you the original premise was already eroding: the company licensed to break a long distance monopoly was increasingly selling something else.

~ how it changed hands ~

TIM Brasil signed a merger agreement on 16 April 2009 to take indirect control, through a vehicle called Holdco, with Intelig's owners as intervening parties. Anatel approved it by Decision 4634 of 11 August 2009, published three days later, and attached a condition that would matter later: the overlap between TIM Celular's and Intelig's fixed telephony licenses had to be eliminated within eighteen months. No cash changed hands. Intelig's holders took shares in TIM Participacoes, cut by an addendum on 30 November from 6.15 percent of each class to 5.14 percent once TIM agreed to absorb roughly 70 million dollars of Intelig's debt. The shareholders approved on 30 December 2009 and the deal closed that day. Merrill Lynch had put Intelig's economic value at about 1.2 billion reais and TIM's reserved capital increase was 517 million, but neither figure is a purchase price, because there was no purchase price.

~ stages of a disappearance ~

The name then took four years to disappear, in stages, and the stages ran in an odd order. On 2 May 2010 TIM began a national campaign by W/McCann under the slogan Intelig agora e TIM, Intelig is now TIM, across television, print, radio, internet and outdoor. That was the consumer brand being handed over. The website outlasted that campaign by thirty-one months: archived captures show intelig.com.br serving its own site as late as 10 December 2012, by then co-branded, footed TIM Intelig 2011, and selling a fixed line product under the 41 code rather than 23. By 28 January 2013 the domain had stopped serving anything of its own and was redirecting into TIM's business pages.

The formal end was reported on 15 April 2014, when Valor Economico had it that TIM would abolish the Intelig brand and deactivate the inherited network along with it, moving most of the roughly 3,000 corporate customers still on it. That is where this grave is filed, at month precision, because it is the only dated account of the brand being ended and it is one outlet citing another. TIM's own annual report for that year does not mention it.

~ the entity that outlived its name ~

Here is the part that makes Intelig different from an ordinary absorption. The legal person never died. On 6 September 2017 Intelig Telecomunicacoes Ltda changed its corporate form and renamed itself TIM S.A., and on 31 October 2018 TIM Celular was merged into it, bringing over 17 billion reais of net book assets. The surviving company in that merger was Intelig wearing a new name. The brand Brazilians dialed is gone, and the company behind it is now the main operating entity of one of the country's largest mobile carriers, trading under the name of the firm that bought it.

The number did not survive either. Current regulator-sourced tables of carrier selection codes run 21, 22, 24, 41, with no 23 anywhere in the sequence. Two digit codes are scarce national infrastructure held at the regulator's discretion, and 23 went back into the pool when the company holding it stopped needing it.

~ dialing a brand ~

I never had to choose a carrier with my thumb. Turkey ran long distance through the state company and then through prefix codes that most people ignored, and the habit never formed here the way it did in Brazil. What I find strange about Intelig, reading it from the outside, is the lottery. A company spent fifteen years and billions of reais building a brand around two digits it was assigned at random on a Tuesday in March, and when the brand ended the digits went back to the regulator to be handed to somebody else. Most dead companies leave a name behind that nobody else can use. This one left a number, and the number is simply available.

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