vivatel, a subsidary of former state-owned BTC, is the third entrant to Bulgarian mobile market, who launched commercial operations in 2006. Prepaid (Bulgarian: predplateni) SIMs are not sold under a certain brand, but under certain tariff names (e.g. Aide, Opa!, Raz Dva, SIMpatija), which only differ in national voice rates.
vivatel "predplateni" SIMs are available everywhere in electronic and phone shops and do not require any registration. Top-up vouchers are sold at all kind of shops, gas stations, restaurants etc.


network
Despite the late launch vivatel's 2G-coverage is almost equal to it's competitors. There is a wide-spread EDGE-coverage based on GSM900/1800 while the bigger cities 3G service (UMTS2100) including HSDPA-support with 1.8 MBit/s of downstream and 384 KBit/s of upstream.





data tariff
Data is charged with 1.50 lv/MB (= € 0.77/MB) in 1 KB increments.


internet experience
Several services appear to be blocked:

• AGPS servers are unreachable (failed to connect to h-slip.mnc003.mcc284.pub.3gppnetwork.org & supl.nokia.com)
• Nokia Maps could also not connect to the maps server
• SIP seems to be blocked
• All web traffic passes some gateway/proxy even without such being set, which has the IP 82.137.72.32. This proxy obviously does some user-agent-related content filtering, as accessing the web through the internet APN from a Nokia N95 resulted in error pages for two days, while Opera Mini and a desktop browser worked.
• In October 2008 web access from the standard browser of a Nokia N95 was impossible with (OTA-configured) WAP settings, while it worked with a BenQ Siemens S68 sometimes

All in all internet access is restricted for some services and rather unreliable, as web access fails sometimes.

settings

• Internet over GPRS/EDGE/3G
  • АPN: internet.vivatel.bg
  • username: vivatel
  • password: vivatel
  • DNS: automatic
• WAP over GPRS/EDGE/3G
  • АPN: wap.vivatel.bg
  • homepage/relay server: wap.vivatel.bg
  • username: wap
  • password: wap
  • proxy/IP: 192.168.123.123
  • port: 9201 (WAP 1.1) or 8080 (WAP 2.0)
  • DNS: automatic

further settings at: http://www.btc.bg/en/business/services/20/40/