The company was originally formed as part of Telebrás, the state-owned telecom monopoly at the time.

The following operators merged to form Vivo: Owned by Telefónica Owned by Portugal Telecom Acquired by the joint venture New operations in the Northeast region The Vivo brand was launched on 13 April 2003, as a mobile phone service provider.

[3] It originated from the merger of several Brazilian mobile phone operations under a joint-venture owned equally by Portugal Telecom (PT) and Spain's Telefónica.

[4][5] Today Vivo operates an UMTS, 3G networks and bands 1, 7, 3, 28 4G LTE in most Brazilian cities.

Initially, the network was based on analog AMPS (IS-95) and parts (resulting from acquisition of other companies), using TDMA (IS-136).