Anatel aims to revoke licences and crack down on thousands of regional broadband providers operating without proper legal authorisation, signalling a significant enforcement drive to improve standards across Brazil’s fixed broadband market.
Brazil’s telecom regulator is moving towards one of its largest enforcement drives yet against fixed broadband providers that have not proved they are operating legally. According to Canaltech, Anatel may open proceedings against about 13,000 regional internet companies, a figure that would affect a large share of the roughly 20,000 firms authorised to offer the Serviço de Comunicação Multimídia, or SCM, the licence used for broadband service in Brazil.
The scale of the crackdown became clearer after Vinicius Caram, Anatel’s superintendent for licensing and service authorisations, presented the numbers at the Telcomp 2026 symposium in Brasília. Anatel’s own update said 5,085 fixed-broadband providers have already been removed from the official register after missing the deadline set by the sector’s regularisation plan. Caram said the aim is not to punish legitimate operators, but to address what the agency sees as an unsustainable decline in standards across the market. The regulator said companies that continue to operate without regularising themselves may face inspections, administrative sanctions and classification as clandestine providers.
The agency is also looking at other warning signs. Canaltech reported that about 10,000 providers have no station records at Anatel, a detail the superintendent described as suspicious. Of the companies that have applied for the technical, fiscal and labour regularity certificate, slightly more than half were fully compliant, while the rest had some type of pending issue. Among those deficiencies, technical documentation accounted for 49%, labour issues for 46% and fiscal problems for 4%, according to the Canaltech report.
Anatel is not limiting its scrutiny to the providers themselves. Gesiléa Teles, the agency’s superintendent for inspection, said wholesalers that sell infrastructure and other inputs also need to verify the legality of the firms they serve. She warned that doing business with an illegal operator amounts to complicity. The regulator has also reported cases involving illicit equipment, including stolen or uncertified gear, as well as clandestine TV services that may amount to unauthorised pay-TV distribution under the SeAC framework. In a national enforcement action called Operação Provedor Legal, Anatel said it worked with federal and state police across all 27 states and detained six representatives of clandestine providers in flagrant circumstances.
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