Airtel gets Opera Mini

Sunil Kamath speaks at the event.

Bharti Airtel, a leading integrated telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa, has announced that it has signed a global arrangement with Opera Software to offer a customised and co-branded version of Opera Mini internet browser for Airtel mobile customers across its operations.
With this, Airtel customers across countries including Bangladesh, India, South Asia and Africa will now be able to leverage Opera Mini's unique proxy-server-based technology to compress data by up to 90% and decrease their data transfer costs.
In line with that Airtel Bangladesh recently held a programme to announce the partnership with Opera here in Bangladesh.
Designed for speed and ease of use, Opera Mini provides remarkably fast browsing on nearly any mobile phone. It makes browsing up to nine times as fast as client-only mobile browsers on both 2/2.5G and 3G networks. With its small footprint and high level of usability, Opera Mini provides a consistent user experience across a broad range of handsets.
"To ensure customers get best quality services that they are paying for this is one of our unique offerings and more to follow," said Abhay Seth, chief sales and marketing officer, Airtel Bangladesh Ltd.
"With Opera Mini, the Airtel customers will be able to browse almost 6 times faster and they will get array of data services," he said.
Opera Software has agreements with 13 out of the top 30 operators globally. Used by over 168 million users, Opera Mini is the world's most popular web browser on mobile phones. Opera Mini's popularity in emerging markets can be credited to its smooth performance on basic and non-smartphones.
"Opera's advanced consumption methodology helps subscriber to save 90 % of his data and it reduces all the hadsets' processing and battery usage while browsing," said Ziaul Haq Shikdar, VAS Head, Airtel Bangladesh Ltd.
"It will give you complete PC-like experience on any data enable handset," Shikdar said.
He said Airtel will give 15 Samsung Galaxy Y smartphones to 15 customers who will browse most using the Opera Mini until July 31.
Sunil Kamath, sales director, India and SAARC, Opera Software, at the event said Opera is very happy and excited to be partner with Airtel.
During his speech he shared Opera's technology and business.
"Bangladesh is one of our fastest growing markets and with partnership with Airtel it will go to a different level," said Kamath.
"In Bangladesh, we currently drive more than 50% mobile web traffic which means potentially one out of two users browses through Opera Mini," he said.
On the technology of Opera, he said it is proxy-based server which means it is a client server browser.
All the Opera Mini clients on handsets take the processing requirements from the phones and moves the web requests to the Opera Mini server and then come back with the results.
Opera Mini servers compress web data by up to 90% which means it compresses web pages.
For example Kamath said "if you go to facebook on a native browser, it's around 200kb, but if you open the same page by Opera Mini, it's only 23kb."
You can download Opera Mini from m.opera.com or visit the Airtel App Store.