Telefones de Lisboa e Porto

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

~ the obituary ~

In January 1882 the Portuguese government signed a concession with the Edison Gower Bell Telephone Company of Europe to build public telephone networks in Lisbon and Porto. Three months later Lisbon's network opened with 32 telephones on it, and the first directory, printed that May, listed 22 subscribers. Porto followed on the first of June. Five years after that the concession was handed to a new British firm, the Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Company, and everywhere in Portugal that was not one of those two cities was left to the post and telegraph administration.

Nobody planned the arrangement that came out of this, and the best account of it says so directly: the split followed from political and economic circumstances rather than any designed strategy. The two cities were where the money was, so a private company took them, and the state took the parts of the country nobody wanted. By 1904 the government was running its own lines and reached Braga and Coimbra the following year. The border between the two systems then sat where it was for ninety years.

The Anglo-Portuguese concession ran out on 31 December 1967. A decree signed that October set out what came next: from 1 January 1968 the service would be run by a financially autonomous public company called Telefones de Lisboa e Porto, with legal personality under public law and its seat in Lisbon. It inherited 312,000 main lines and 1,701 public telephones, and it inherited the shape of the map as well.

~ the case file ~

~ lisbon and porto ~

The statute defined TLP's territory not by a service but by an old contract, giving it the areas written into the concessions granted to the Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Company: two zones, one centered on Lisbon and one on Porto, each taking in the surroundings of its city. Everything outside those two circles stayed with the state network, and traffic leaving the country belonged to a third company, the Companhia Portuguesa Rádio Marconi.

The numbers that came of this are the striking part. By 1982 the two urban zones held about a million telephone lines, which TLP's own corporate history puts at three quarters of every line in Portugal. A company covering two cities carried most of a nation's telephone service, because that was where the subscribers had always been.

~ the company with no board ~

In November 1969, less than two years after creating TLP, the government dissolved its board of directors and its audit board and moved those powers to the equivalent bodies at the post office. The stated purpose was integration, a first step toward a single state communications company. That step was then not followed by a second one for twenty years.

When the government finally converted TLP into a public limited company in May 1989, with share capital of 53.5 billion escudos subscribed entirely by the state, the preamble to that decree described what the previous two decades had produced as a company amputated of its own corporate organs. The 1989 company was legally the same person as the 1968 one, so the entity ran continuously from the first day of 1968 to the merger. It simply spent most of that run being administered by somebody else.

~ the decree ~

Decreto-Lei 122/94, published on 14 May 1994, regulated the merger of three state companies into a single one called Portugal Telecom: Telecom Portugal and Teledifusora de Portugal, alongside TLP itself. Marconi was not part of it, whatever the Portuguese Wikipedia article says. What the decree notably does not do is name a day for any of this to happen: it says the merger takes its effect from the date of the resolution of the holding company's general meeting, and leaves it there.

So the record splits. The Portuguese state, writing its own decree seven months later, says Portugal Telecom was created on 23 July 1994. Portugal Telecom, writing to the SEC, says it was incorporated on 23 June 1994 with the merger effective for accounting purposes from 1 January. Both are primary and they disagree by a month. A statute that hands the moment of death to an unpublished shareholder vote produces exactly this.

Turkey ran its telephones through a state monopoly too, and the 14.4k modem I started with in 1998 dialed out over a line the state had only lately stopped owning outright. The difference is the one worth noting here. Portugal's monopoly was split in two by an accident of Victorian business judgment and stayed split for over a century, long enough for the arrangement to look deliberate to everyone who grew up inside it.

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