Greetings from Croatia!
I have started using my normal voice VIPme SIM for data. All is fine, I put the card in my Huawei B970 router, and voila, I have wifi in our hotel room
Works fine.
Just a few things of my experience.
When I first put the card in my phone, it automatically configured an APN "start" and connected the internet using the APN automatically... It took me 3-4 kn before I realized it happened. Then I deleted that APN and set my phone to use gprs0.vipnet.hr and not anything else.
The second thing. I wanted to top-up so I went to a VIP shop. I was told I cannot top up using my credit card there, only cash. So I went to the other side of the road and bought a voucher from an ATM. The instructions in English are printed on the ATM voucher, but still, it was a blind-ride as the system I had to call to topup only spoke Croatian
You can buy the SURF20 and SURF100 packages by sending SMS to the free number 792. I sent the first such SMS, and was replied immediately by SMS that the package will be activated within 24 hours... Well, in fact it was active immediately, but... Immediately I sent another SURF100 message to 792 (I wanted to add multiple packages ), but got an SMS that it was unsuccessful. About 10 minutes later I got an SMS that a 100MB had been activated. This confirmed the first purchase.... After this SMS I sent the purchase request again, and got a new SMS saying it will be activated within 24 hours
So, if you need several times 100MB, it is not the most convenient way, but it does work if you are patient and do not necessarily want to buy the whole lot of data package all at once.
HSDPA coverage at our hotel in Porec is acceptable even indoors, but I have an external directional antenna with gain, so I have excellent signal strength. I do not want to waste bytes on speedtests, but when I tried it once it was about 1.1 Mbps down and 320 kbps up. Good enough for anything I need it for, even VoIP works fine with my Nokia phone and asterisk server at home
