Geo-Referencing Brazilian Public Telephones
Geovane Cayres Magalhaes
CPqD Telecom and IT Solutions Rod. Campinas MogiMirim km 118,5
13083-350 CAMPINAS SP Brazil
Enaldo Montanha
Fundacao Paulista de Tecnologia e Educacao
Av. Nicolau Zarvos, 1925 16401-301 LINS SP Brazil
Abstract
Brazilian fixed line telecom operators have met the goal of having installed their pay
phones for public access so that no citizen living in a locality of more than 300
inhabitants must walk more than 300 meters to reach a pay phone. Proving to
ANATEL, the Brazilian regulatory agency, that this had been accomplished
involving many geospatial services, including GPS, field survey, GIS, and Internet
deployment of geographical queries. Brazil now has almost 1.5 million pay phones,
all of them geo-referenced.
Introduction
The Government can play a major role in deploying large national mapping projects. Several of
these projects are carried out by national agencies that have a specific mission to provide certain
types of mapping infrastructure. This is the case of the TIGER files provided by the US Census
Bureau.
In this paper we will describe another way that governments can, indirectly, foster national
mapping projects. To fulfill a specific government regulation, Brazilian telephone companies
had to perform a big task: build a national map of Brazil showing localities of greater than 300
inhabitants and the proper placement of their public access pay phones (TUP). It helped the
telecom operators to thus map their concession area and to geo-reference and distribute about 1.5
million pay phones.
The regulations set the goal that the telephone companies had to meet to be compliant with
ANATEL, the Brazilian telecommunications regulatory agency. One of the key goals achieved
was that no citizen living in a locality of more than 300 inhabitants should have to walk more
than 300 meters to reach a pay phone. Brazil is now one of the countries with the most pay
phones per inhabitant, with a high degree of distribution reaching all citizens.
Some of the activities that had to be performed to achieve this included: the processing of
satellite images, field surveys with GPS, the application of geo-coding techniques, the use of
applications to select the best distribution of pay phones, the coordination of thousands of
workers, and the remote distribution of management systems.
Some regions had good quality maps. For those regions, it was sometimes possible to georeference
public telephones by address interpolation. Another option was the direct placement
over the map of the result of field surveying. In areas with maps with some precision and no
address reference, rubber sheeting was employed to adjust the map so that the GPS field survey
could be used. In other areas, satellite images plus GPS field survey for placement of pay phones
and street centerline acquisition proved to be effective. This required an enormous amount of
work and the logistics were very complex.
Goals to be Met
In 1998,the Brazilian government established rules for the privatization of the national
telecommunications system. Before privatization, the system was comprised of a holding
company, TELEBRAS, and 28 other companies. A regulatory agency, ANATEL, was created.
For fixed telephony, the country was divided into five concession areas. Three main, large areas
composed of several states, and two remaining small municipal areas. A concession was sold to
an incumbent telecommunications company (TELCO) for each of these areas. These concessions
inherited the infrastructure already in place. For the main areas, three other concessions were
sold to “mirror” competing companies. For cellular telephony, other concession areas were set.
For long distance operations one incumbent and one “mirror” concession were set for the whole
country. More information on the concessions and Brazilian telecommunications regulation can
be found at www.anatel.gov.br.
Of specific interest in this paper is Law # 2.592, dated May 15, 1998. This applies to the five
incumbent telecommunications companies only. The plan is aimed at making basic
telecommunications services available to all Brazilians regardless of their social class or place of
residence. It established a number of goals to be met. However, for the sake of simplicity, we
will summarize the goals to be met by each incumbent which require some form of geospatial
information technology (GIT) and services:
- To provide services to each locality of more than 300 inhabitants, by the end of the
year 2005;
- No one, living in a locality, should walk more than 300 meters to reach a pay phone
(TUP), by the end of year 2003;
- To activate a certain number of TUP, by state, totaling close to one million by the end
of the year 2001;
- To increase the density of TUP to at least 8.0 TUP / 1000 inhabitants and 3% of the
total access lines installed, by the end of year 2005. This goal should consider the
spatial distribution of 3 TUP per 1000 inhabitants, even for precariously urbanized
areas;
- To activate TUP in all regular schools and health institutions within one week of the
request for service, by the end of 2003;
- To activate at least one full service TUP for localities greater than 100 inhabitants
which do not have local telecommunications services by the end of the year 2005 (for
localities with no telecommunications services located more than 30 km from any
locality with local services, the obligation to serve it was given to the incumbent long
distance telecommunications company);
- To establish point of sales not far from the TUP.
Other peculiarities concerning the types of TUP and the services they allow are omitted here
for simplicity’s sake. Complete information can be obtained from the ANATEL Web site.
The concessions were sold at the end of July 1998, and there were partial goals to be met.
However, only the final goals are described herein because there was a clause stating that if a
company met their goals early and by the end of year 2001, they would be able to leave their area
in order to compete with the other incumbent and mirror companies. All the TELCOS attempted
to do this, and so 2001 was a very busy year.
