Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom player has partnered with Opera Software to bring a customized Opera Mini browser to Bharti Airtel’s subscribers. Bharti has presence in 20 countries across Asia and Africa, this deal will allow Bharti and Opera to offer a co-branded and customized browser for Bharti subscribers.
Opera Mini uses unique-proxy-server based technology to compress data by upto 90% and thereby decreasing the data costs. Airtel offers 2G, 3G and 4G data services in India. It has 2G plan with 30 days validity at Rs 98, 1GB free data. Similar 3G plan will give 500MB data for Rs 250 for 30 days. For Airtel this technology makes a lot of sense as both the carrier and users will be able to save lot on transfer. Airtel will be able to tout this to attract new customers and eventually increase the data subscribers list. For users who are on tight budgets this is very useful to keep the data costs minimal.
Opera Mini is already available for smartphones and feature phones, this deal will help Opera to increase its presence in India more. I use Opera on both my Android and iPhone, the start page of Opera already shows Airtel Live pages links from quite some time.
Opera Mobile browsers are quite popular and is the most popular web browser as of writing this post, it lost it’s position to Android robot browser in March first time and regained and going neck to neck to now.
