Vivo (Telefonica)

Company Overview

Telefônica Brasil, trading as Vivo, is the largest mobile network operating in Brazil. The company is a subsidiary of Telefonica SA, although company was originally formed as part of Telebrás, a state-owned telecom monopoly. In 1998, Telebrás was demerged and privatised leading to Telefónica S.A. purchasing a section of the company branding the new carrier as Telefónica. The network was later rebranded to Vivo in April 2012.

The company operates 2G services on standard 900/1800 MHz bands, and in 2008 launched 3G services on B1 (2100 MHz) and B5 (850 MHz). In partnership with Ericsson and Huawei, Vivo launched 4G LTE services in April 2013, initially over B7 (2600 MHz) but later increasing capacity using B3 (1800 MHz) and B28 (700 MHz) after digital dividend spectrum auctions in 2014. In October 2016 Vivo demonstrated 3C carrier aggregation of B3 + B7 + B28 providing peak data rates of up to 530 Mbps.

Vivo has considered deployment of B31 (450 MHz) LTE to provide coverage to regional and rural villages in Brazil, however to date the network has not been constructed.

In February 2017 Telefonica announced its global partnership agreement with Sigfox, extending the reach of the IoT network to all countries that Telefonica subsidiaries operate. A Sigfox network has been operational in Brazil through partner WND Brasil since April 2016.

Vivo 5G

Vivo and technology partner Huawei successfully tested 5G in July 2018 using 64T64R equipment on the n78 (3500 MHz) band. Vivo is a member of the Projeto 5G Brasil initiative.