In competitive markets, there is a familiar rule: size protects — until the moment it becomes the problem itself. Brazil’s telecommunications sector currently offers an almost textbook illustration of this paradox.
Oi, for decades presented as a “supertelco” and a symbol of national scale, ultimately turned its gigantism into a burden.
Accumulated debt, aging infrastructure, and slow processes transformed the company into a kind of corporate dinosaur: enormous, heavy, and unable to change direction when the demand around it moves at 5G speed.
But reducing the crisis of major carriers to a balance-sheet equation would be missing the central point. The financial collapse is only the visible symptom of a deeper problem.
Meanwhile, regional providers — once discreet supporting actors — quickly understood this shift in logic. This gap between the human and the high-tech became a strategic opportunity. In the new telecom game, those who get closer win — not those who grow.
The Structural Slowness: The Collapse of the B2P Relationship
The failure of the large carriers does not appear first in keeping pace with technology (though that also happens), but at the edges where the human meets the system — and where the system repeatedly fails to respond.
Billing and quality — issues that should be routine and easily resolved — account for 37.7% and 37.02% of complaints filed in Brazil.
ANATEL’s (National Telecommunications Agency) numbers, even dry and bureaucratic, serve as an almost clinical diagnosis of this disconnection. Billing and quality — issues that should be routine and easily resolved — account for 37.7% and 37.02% of complaints filed in Brazil, respectively.
These and other figures speak less to isolated problems and more to an organizational architecture that produces inefficiency as an inevitable feature.
ANATEL also shows that more than two-thirds of users had to contact their providers at least once within six months — a statistic that may reveal not just dissatisfaction but also the inability of internal processes to operate without constant intervention.
In theory, the digitalization of service channels should have smoothed this journey; in practice, it merely shifted frustration to faster interfaces that remain equally devoid of solutions.
This slowness is not technological. It is structural. Legacy corporate systems were designed for a time when customer experience was treated as an operational appendix, not as the core of the service.
The result is a typical irony of the digital era: the more automated the service, the more evident the absence of human responsiveness becomes. And in telecom, this failure is amplified because the service delivered is, precisely, communication.
Latin America and the Paradox of Telcos Too Big to Move
Digital transformation is always announced as an inevitable path, and most already view it positively, but in Latin American telecommunications it often stalls before even leaving the conceptual stage.
The rhetoric of innovation moves faster than the actual capacity to execute it. In an environment where revenue grows slowly and investment is squeezed, major carriers become trapped in what could be called paralysis by analysis: endless cycles of studies, committees, and reviews that replace action with the deceptive sensation of progress.
The Telco Transformation Latam assessment exposes this contradiction in almost tragic terms. EBITDA margin tends to follow market share, but it is precisely the companies that dominate the market that face the most difficulty in renewing their networks, simplifying processes, or reorganizing structures.
Scale — once celebrated as an advantage — has crystallized operational practices, making them resistant to any attempt at reinvention. Instead of engines of change, these carriers have become compliance machines.
The Extreme Example: Oi’s Crisis as the Synthesis of the “Dinosaur”
If Brazil’s telecommunications sector needed a case study to symbolize the effects of mismanaged gigantism, Oi would unquestionably be the most emblematic example.
In 2016, the company filed for the largest court-supervised restructuring in the country’s history, dragging behind it a debt of roughly R$ 65.4 billion — the kind of figure that, in any other sector, would make analysts wonder whether they were looking at a corporation or a small, heavily indebted country.
The problem did not stem from a sudden shock, but from something more prosaic and predictable: a decade of disordered acquisitions, inconsistent decisions, and an infrastructure that aged faster than executives were willing to admit. Instead of modernizing the network, the company chose to manage the past — until the past became unpayable.
The Corporate Crisis Reflected in B2P
When Oi slid into its deepest crisis, the turbulence did not remain confined to financial statements. Courts were forced into near-acrobatic interventions to prevent the company’s bankruptcy — requested, suspended, and reframed as judicial recovery — from leaving millions of users without essential services.
Management, cornered by creditors on one side and court rulings on the other, shifted into survival mode: liquidate assets, halt bleeding debt, avoid collapse. In this equation, the customer inevitably lost priority.
Amid renegotiations, auctions, and emergency decisions, customer service became collateral damage — an almost natural consequence when the majority of corporate energy is diverted from improving services to keeping the organism itself alive. It is the perfect portrait of a corporate dinosaur: too big to fall quickly, but too slow to get back up.
The Rise of the Agile: The Competitive Advantage of ISPs
The consolidation of regional ISPs in Brazil is not an isolated chapter of entrepreneurship, but the logical outcome of a technological shift that favors smaller organizations — simpler, leaner, and less tied to high operational hierarchies.
As fiber optics replaced copper as the backbone of broadband, the historical advantage of large carriers — their vast legacy parks and national structures — ceased to be an asset and began functioning as a weight.
Fiber expansion depends less on scale and more on execution capacity, precise planning, and a structure capable of moving at the speed of demand. In this context, local providers emerge not as exceptions but as the model best suited to the new environment.
The Fiber Boom and the Leadership of Regional Players
The data is revealing. Almost 25 thousand local providers reached a market share of 46.9%, becoming leaders in nearly four thousand municipalities. This accelerated growth is not the result of business miracles, but of an environment where new networks — free from the shackles of previous technologies — can be deployed with speed and precision.
While large operators attempt to patch an overweight past, the ISPs’ simplicity becomes the foundation of future functionality.
Proximity, Focus, and Response Speed
The advantage of regional players is not only technical; it is structural. Shorter processes and local teams enable more direct interaction with the customer. Without outsourced call centers or layers of bureaucratic filtering, support becomes less performative and more functional.
Technicians who know the territory and speak the same language solve problems before they become complaints — a practice that depends more on organization and culture than on advanced technology.
The Proof of Satisfaction: The Customer Verdict
The results appear consistently in ANATEL surveys. In a sector where dissatisfaction tends to be the norm, ISPs achieve higher scores across the main indicators.
The predominance of fiber — massively adopted by these providers — explains part of the performance, but not all. Customer satisfaction indicates something deeper: smaller structures, when well organized, can deliver a more stable and predictable experience than giants weighed down by their own legacies.
The Market’s Future: The LATAM Customer’s Demand
Customer experience in Latin America has become a more accurate thermometer than any financial indicator. In a region marked by historically irregular services and persistent bureaucracies, consumers have learned to quickly identify where technology truly improves their lives — and where it is merely another layer of varnish over old structures.
This heightened sensitivity means that the promise of innovation holds little value unless accompanied by consistent execution. The future of the market, therefore, depends not only on the adoption of new tools but on the ability of companies to convert them into faster, more transparent, and more reliable responses.
Technological Agility: Niche Optimization
Within this context, ISPs advance because they operate with a structural clarity that large carriers often lack. Instead of pursuing big transformations, they adopt niche-oriented technological strategies. Whitelabel solutions, modular platforms, and lean management systems allow them to evolve from mere connectivity providers into full technological partners.
This approach does not eliminate limitations — many ISPs still need to allocate most of their resources to resolving immediate demands — but it reduces the space between intention and execution.
By combining diversified portfolios with rapid deployment and moderate costs, they shorten time-to-market and become more aligned with Latin
American customer expectations: services that not only promise agility but actually work. And it is at this intersection between these multiple market actors that LatWan’s solutions have flourished. The Brazilian company understood early on that the future of the market may not belong to the largest players, but to those capable of keeping their structures light enough to match the rhythm of their users.
Conclusion: The New Metric of Competitive Advantage
In the labyrinth of Latin American telecommunications, two signals — discreet yet decisive — point to where competitive advantage is truly migrating. The efficiency of regional support shows that paying attention to the immediate customer generates tangible results.
On the other hand, ANATEL’s data reveals that the growing preference for local providers is no mere coincidence, but the verdict of a market made up of real people.
In a sector accustomed to measuring strength by capex and coverage, the metric has changed: response speed, adaptability, and operational relationship.
Whoever masters this dynamic will set the rules for the next Latin American cycle.
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