Opera has announced a two-fold agreement today with TeliaSonera. The mobile operator is co-creating a new data center with Opera in Poland. But this center will also act as a new server hub for Opera Mini in Eastern Europe, which significantly expands the mobile browsers European network
This will be Opera’s fourth data center around the world. Having a large hub in Poland will allow a lot of Opera Minis page-crunching to be done in one location. This will take a lot of the burden off smaller servers, and should make the browser a lot faster.
From the release:
“In order to keep up with Opera Mini’s rapid growth rate, we needed to open a new hosting center in Europe,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Having this new data center as part of our global network services will enable us to bring Opera Mini to even more users. It will considerably improve our capacity to deliver the Internet on any device, anytime, anywhere.”
“By working together, Opera’s new server park in our site enables faster browsing by improving latency for customers,” said Peter Arke, Vice President and Head of Wholesale Sales Norway, Denmark, Finland&Baltics TeliaSonera International Carrier. “Our goal is to ensure ease of communication, and by working with Opera, we are committing more resources to European mobile customers who want a better and faster way to access online content on-the-go.”
What we think?
The ongoing mobile browser wars is one of the major things to watch in the mobile Web market at the moment. You have Bolt and Skyfire duking it out, and Fennec draws ever closer. Even though it’s constrained to one device, the Safari mobile browser on iPhone is more than big enough to give them all a run for their money. But Opera is climbing fast. In March, Opera reported that more than 23 million people used Opera Mini alone. And the figure is climbing.
