Compañía Peruana de Teléfonos
Peruvian telecommunications company (1920–1993)
Compañía Peruana de Teléfonos (Spanish for "Peruvian Telephone Company", CPT) was a Peruvian public telecommunications company and later privatised telephone company that operated only in the cities of Lima and Callao. A football team of the same name was established in 1970 by workers of the company.
History
Created on June 25, 1920, the Compañía Peruana de Telephones Ltda. was created, later merging with the British Peruvian Telephone Company, founded in 1888. By then, the telephone service had only four thousand telephones nationwide, being all manual. Then in 1930, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) acquired 60% of the shares. By December, the first automatic exchange on Jirón Washington in Lima began operating, with capacity for 2,000 more lines.
On March 25, 1970, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru decided to nationalise CPT. Then, in 1973, it expropriated the CPT and the National Telecommunications Company (Spanish: Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones) founded a year earlier, with the latter assuming the services provided by the Peruvian branches of the ITT and Ericsson in the interior of the country and leaving the CPT with services in the metropolitan area of Lima. In May 1974, CPT began operating the microwave network.
In 1981, the company introduced Rin, a special coin to be used at all of its payphones in order to discourage theft.
The public source identifies “Compañía Peruana de Teléfonos” as peruvian telecommunications company (1920–1993). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Compañía, Peruana and Teléfonos.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28502315. VIAF identifies the subject as 138993608. The Library of Congress control number is n89617307. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1920, 1888 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Compañía Peruana de Teléfonos” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.