Artist rendition of the Intelsat 33e satellite. Photo: Intelsat

Intelsat announced that telecom provider Vivacom will use the Intelsat 33e satellite to distribute Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) services throughout Bulgaria. The company is transitioning the DTT service to Intelsat 33e, which entered service in January, from Intelsat 12 at 45 degrees East. Vivacom will continue to use Intelsat 12 and the 45 degrees east location to further expand Direct-to-Home (DTH) offerings in Bulgaria, uplink business and complement the DTT services.

Intelsat 33e, located at 60 degrees east, provides Vivacom access to higher performance bandwidth over Bulgaria — well suited for supporting the company’s growing DTT business as well as its expansion beyond its traditional broadband and government applications.

According to Intelsat, Intelsat 33e also allows for connectivity between spectrum types, in any bandwidth increment and from any beam to any beam. This offers Vivacom the capability to use its existing 18.3-meter C-band antenna at Teleport Plana for uplink to increase availability while delivering the content via Ku-band to several hundred DTT retransmission sites.