Rede4

» see rede4.pt as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 27 June 2005 Sonaecom announced that Portugal had a new low-price mobile operator called rede4. The pitch was a single number: 11.99 cents a minute for voice calls to any network, plus 5.99 cents for every text sent. The company called itself the cheapest network in the market and promised savings of somewhere between 37 and 54 percent against its rivals. It arrived days after TMN had launched UZO on exactly the same idea, so the two cheapest things in Portuguese mobile were born within days of each other.

It was not a network and it was not a company. Sonaecom's own interim report for that half-year describes rede4 as an autonomous low-cost operation using Optimus infrastructure, sold through exclusive distribution over the internet, run on what the report calls a no-frills philosophy: spend as little as possible on advertising, on general marketing, on distribution and on looking after the customer. By the 2007 annual report the language had stopped pretending. Rede4 is listed there as a low-cost offer brand, alongside Optimus Home and the Kanguru dongle.

The strange part from the outside is the distribution. Buying a Portuguese mobile line in 2005 meant going to the rede4 website, which was the single channel it was sold through. In Turkey that year a prepaid line still meant a counter and an identity document, which is why a telephone company with no shops at all reads to me as a piece of somebody else's regulatory weather rather than a product I could have signed up to.

~ the record ~

~ a website with a price list ~

The launch cost about four million euros, most of it the site and the campaign that pointed at the site. Where rede4 differed from UZO was the catch underneath the headline rate: Optimus required its customers to top up, with a minimum of fifteen euros a month, while TMN's version asked for nothing. Two weeks in, on 12 July 2005, rede4 published a second tariff with no mandatory top-up for people who barely used a phone. Sonaecom shares closed down 2.37 percent on announcement day at 3.30 euros, which is roughly how much the market thought a price war was worth.

The stated targets were a hundred thousand customers by the end of 2005 and 11 percent of the market inside four years. Neither number was ever reported against. Sonaecom never broke rede4 out in any filing, and the nearest thing to a published result is one sentence in the 2007 annual report saying the brand's share of its own segment was running above the Optimus average. Six years of operation produced no published subscriber count at all.

~ what the regulator called it ~

ANACOM, the Portuguese telecoms regulator, never issued rede4 a license, because there was nothing to license. In its market analysis documents the name appears as a brand. A Portuguese Wikipedia editor eventually stripped the operator category off the article in July 2009 with a one-line explanation that rede4 was not a telecommunications operator licensed by ANACOM, which is the most accurate thing anyone wrote about it in six years.

Corporate reality moved underneath the brand without touching it. On 2 November 2007 Optimus Telecomunicações was merged into Novis Telecom and the surviving entity was renamed Sonaecom Serviços de Comunicações. The annual report notes that the reorganization had no impact on the brands, and it did not. One partnership from that year is worth recording because it cuts against the no-frills story: rede4 signed an exclusive deal with Nokia to sell the Nokia handset range under its own offer.

~ the page that never changed ~

The root of rede4.pt was 543 bytes of HTML carrying a Microsoft Visual Studio 7.0 generator tag above an empty title, with nothing in the body but a meta refresh pointing at a path called minuto+barato, cheap minute. That stub is byte-for-byte identical in the Internet Archive's first capture on 29 June 2005 and in its last working one on 16 March 2011. Over six years of trading, the first thing any customer loaded was never edited once.

The date usually given for the end is 17 March 2011, and it is worth being honest about where it comes from. It was typed into the Portuguese Wikipedia article that afternoon by an anonymous address in Portugal, so it is a same-day observation by someone watching rather than a published report. No Portuguese outlet appears to have covered the switch. What does corroborate it is the archive: the site answered normally on 16 March, and by the next capture on 26 April the domain was redirecting to a migration page at optimuspop.optimus.pt whose URL path ends in the word rede4. The tariff that replaced it, Optimus Pop, was itself retired on 16 May 2014.

The domain outlasted everything. From around 2019 the successor company NOS held rede4.pt and served a 1,430-byte page from its own CDN reading "Estamos a construir uma nova marca", we are building a new brand, on a name whose brand had been gone for eight years. Then NOS let it lapse, and rede4.pt stopped resolving.

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