Optimus

» see optimus.pt as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Portugal put its third mobile licence out to tender in 1997 and exactly one bid arrived. The consortium behind it was led by Sonae, the retail group, with France Télécom, the electricity utility EDP, the state holding company IPE and Maxitel alongside. The regulator awarded the licence in November 1997, the company was incorporated as Optimus Telecomunicações, and Ericsson signed a $100 million contract to build the network. Commercial service began in September 1998, which both encyclopedias date to the 15th while the contemporaneous trade press commits only to the month.

Arriving third against two established operators is a bad position, and the way out of it was a promotion called Pioneiros. Anyone who registered before launch got on-net calls at five escudos a minute, about two and a half cents in the euro that had not arrived yet, and got that price for life. Registration ran through Continente, the hypermarket chain owned by the same parent, so the network was sold next to the groceries. Seven hundred thousand registrations came in during the first year, the millionth customer arrived in June 2000, and the campaign won a GSM Association marketing award at Cannes in early 1999.

The aggressive-pricing habit stuck. In 2008 Optimus launched TAG, ten euros a month flat for unlimited calls and messages inside its own network, and both rivals had their own version of it inside a year. By the end of 2011 the network carried 3.64 million customers, around 21 percent of the Portuguese market by the company's own measure, and mobile turnover of 570.7 million euros. Average revenue per user that year was 12.9 euros a month, down from 13.7 the year before, and minutes per user fell with it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the third network everywhere ~

Turkey ran the same experiment on a different schedule. Two operators held the market from 1994, a third licence followed, and the newcomer arrived in 2001 with price as its only argument. I was seventeen when that happened, and the thing I remember about the third network is not its advertising, it is that everyone compared tariffs constantly and nobody could explain them. Optimus is that story in Portuguese, a decade of being the cheap and clever one, ending in a merger with the cable company.

~ what the registry recorded ~

The Portuguese competition authority cleared the merger of Optimus and the cable operator ZON in late August 2013. The commercial registration of the merger went through on 27 August, and on the 28th the holding company issued 206,064,552 new shares and changed its own name to Zon Optimus SGPS. For the next nine months the country had a single operator trading under two brands that had spent fifteen years attacking each other in advertising.

~ sixteen may, seven in the evening ~

The new brand was presented at the FIL exhibition hall in Parque das Nações in Lisbon at seven in the evening on 16 May 2014, to a room holding about eight thousand staff of the former ZON and the former Optimus. Miguel Almeida did the presenting. The name was NOS, which is the Portuguese word for us, and the slogan built on it was há mais em nós, there is more in us.

The Internet Archive caught the optimus.pt homepage at 19:43 UTC that evening. Where the shop had been there was a page of 1,801 bytes, titled Há mais em NOS, reading "A Optimus mudou. Agora é NOS" with a counter ticking down from ten seconds before it forwarded you to nos.pt. The page was built with ZON's web framework and served its images from ZON's content network, so the switch-off was carried out by the other company's engineers. The same day, in the registry, ZON TV Cabo was merged into Optimus Comunicações and the resulting company was renamed NOS Comunicações. Optimus was the legal survivor of its own disappearance.

~ the festival kept the name ~

Optimus had sponsored the Lisbon summer festival since 2008 and it ran that July as Optimus Alive, from the 10th to the 12th, less than two months after the brand that paid for it had been retired. The official site was still titled Optimus Alive 2014 in September. Only in late October did optimusalive.com start redirecting to nosalive.com, and the 2015 edition was the first called NOS Alive.

Sponsorship contracts run on their own calendar, which is how a retired brand ends up printed on a wristband five months after it stopped existing. The festival domain held the name until late October. Today optimus.pt still answers, with a 301 into nos.pt and nothing else behind it.

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