ANATEL certification

ANATEL certification is the route by which any telecommunications product, including a household appliance with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or a cellular modem inside it, gets permission to be sold in Brazil. Under <strong>Resolução nº 715/2019</strong> an Organismo de Certificação Designado (OCD) evaluates test reports from an ANATEL-recognised laboratory and issues a certificate of conformity; ANATEL then homologates the product and assigns a number that must be marked on it under Ato nº 4088/2020. The applicant must be a Brazilian legal entity with a CNPJ, and routers, modems and similar customer equipment must also meet the cybersecurity requirements of Ato nº 77/2021.

Which products need ANATEL certification?

Every product that ANATEL classes as a telecommunications product: phones and modems, network equipment, satellite terminals, and any device with a radio transmitter, whether Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, cellular, NFC or active RFID. Cables, connectors, antennas and power supplies for telecommunications use are on the list as well.

The transmitter is what puts a product in scope, whatever its main function. Appliance makers, vehicle-tracker suppliers, smart-lock and metering companies meet the requirement late because they do not see themselves as telecommunications companies. A washing machine with a Wi-Fi module is a telecommunications product for homologation purposes.

Homologation has no expedited track. A product discovered to need it while the goods are already at sea waits for testing, the OCD and ANATEL like every other product, and the cargo waits with it. The scope check at the design stage takes an afternoon.

Does a homologated radio module avoid certification?

It shortens the work. Building around a module that already holds its own ANATEL homologation lets the OCD reuse the module's radio evaluation, so the finished product is tested for what the module does not cover: electrical safety, electromagnetic compatibility, and SAR where the device is used near the body. The finished product still receives its own certificate and its own homologation number.

The reuse holds only while the product matches the conditions the module maker declared. Those conditions cover the antenna type and gain, where the module is placed in the enclosure, and the output power it is configured to. Change any of them and the radio tests are yours to run again, and the saving that justified the module is gone.

Since Ato nº 77/2021, issued under Resolução nº 740/2020, customer premises equipment such as routers, modems and optical network terminals must also satisfy cybersecurity requirements at homologation, covering credentials, software updates and the handling of vulnerabilities. A module homologation covers none of that.

Who can hold the homologation, and how long does it last?

The applicant is a legal entity with a Brazilian CNPJ: the manufacturer's local subsidiary, the importer, or a representative appointed for the purpose. ANATEL records the homologation in its Mosaico system against that entity, so a change of importer is a regulatory event and the new importer generally needs the homologation reissued in its own name or transferred.

Resolução nº 715/2019 replaced the old categories I, II and III with product types and families, and it sets two shapes of certification. Type-testing certification issues a certificate once, with no maintenance phase. Type testing with periodic product evaluation adds a maintenance cycle in which samples are taken from production or the market and retested; the cycle is fixed per product type in ANATEL's reference list, and a certificate whose maintenance lapses for more than 180 days is suspended and then cancelled.

After homologation the number must appear on the product, either physically or on screen, under the marking procedure in Ato nº 4088/2020. Inspectors check the marking on the shelf; the certificate in a drawer does not satisfy them. Decide the label or the settings screen with the tooling, before the first production run.

What the process involves