Opera has released its monthly “State of the Mobile Web” report for September, and like usual, it paints an excellent picture of where the mobile Web currently stands- from the perspective of one of the most popular mobile browsers in use today.
This month’s report outlines the typical growth in all categories including pageviews, data transfered, overall users and more, but also includes the bold statement that Opera is saving mobile consumers over $8 billion per year in data-usage charges (based on their mobile data compression technology) – more on that later.
In terms of users, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini last month- an 11.5 percent jump over August ’09 and more than 150 percent compared to September ’08. Opera introduced the first beta of Opera Mini 5 last month and reports two major milestones in terms of sheer usage- Opera’s mobile browsers facilitated more than 500 million pageviews per day, on average, and processed a hefty 2 petabytes of data via its servers in one month’s time. To put it in perspective, 2 petabytes is equal to 2,000 terabytes (TBs).
Because of Opera’s compression technology, which is estimated to compress up to 90 percent of the data to save network bandwidth, the company says users in the top 10 countries (Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam) save up to $672 million USD per month, or over $8.1 billion USD per year, thanks to the compression rate of 90% and the subsequent savings in mobile data charges from users’ wireless providers.
While this is no doubt an impressive number, TechCrunch has already adequately called out their method for arriving at these numbers by explaining their methodology further: Opera looked at the top operators in each country, determined how much they typically charge per MB of browsing, and averaged those figures together. The average cost of browsing in each country was then multiplied by the amount of traffic generated in each country, and the resulting totals were summed and compared to the totals for uncompressed data traffic. The big caveat: Opera’s survey only reflects metered rates (cost per MB) and not flat-rate subscription options, which skews the numbers in their favor.
Whatever the case may be, the latest report provides one of the most accurate and interesting snapshots of the mobile Web, and we’ll take what we can get. Head on over and download the report for yourself.
