 This changed in 1998, as a result of the privatization of Telebras, and the blossoming of private companies, such as "Telefónica", "Telemar" and "Brasil Telecom".With the surge of competition for customers, coupled with government-imposed requirements, came improvements in cost, quality, and availability of the Internet to Brazilians.ADSL was successful in Brazil during beta testing and became popular in 2000, being offered by Telefónica (Speedy), Brasil Telecom (Turbo), NET (Virtua), and Telemar (Velox) with typical speeds of around 256 kbit/s down and 128 kbit/s up.