Europe : Mobiltel won the UMTS A Class license tender for a 20-year term. The tender included a secret bidding and took two hours. The closing bid achieved – which is also the winning one for Mobiltel - amounted to BGN 78 million.

The Bulgarian mobile operator won the tender in competition with BTC. With respect to the initial tender provisions stipulated, each participant had to deposit the amount of BGN 2 million.

‘By winning the UMTS license, Mobiltel has set a new beginning in Bulgaria’s telecommunications development and has once again proved its leading market position. The license amount will be fully covered by our own funds. We are extremely happy to be first to ever introduce 3G technology based services’, said Nikolay Nikolov, Executive Director, M-tel.

Mobiltel will immediately start with the 3G network construction, for the purpose of which the company will again invest millions of euros in the Bulgarian economy. Till end-2006, 3G mobile services will be in operation in Bulgaria’s 5 biggest cities.

UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) is a technology, combining mobile communications and Internet. The basic technological difference between GSM and GPRS to UMTS is the unique radio-technology, which not only gives possibility for voice telephony, but is developed especially for applications, based on high-speed data transfer. This allows the receiving and sending of video files in real time, such as video call, video conference and video message.

The 3G network enables the TV watching on the mobile phone’s screen, the using of high-speed Internet etc.

Just as an instance of comparison – the UMTS data transfer is about seven times faster than if using EDGE and approximately twenty times if using GPRS.