At Opera, we believe that the data compression in our products is the simple reason which enables millions of people to use the internet. Without it, their internet experience would be slow, expensive, clunky or simply impossible on their devices.
Education, affordability and lack of infrastructure are the three major barriers to people getting online. By removing the affordability and infrastructure barriers with our technology, we can expose people to the third: education.
- Education — The first step towards an informed society
Imagine a world where people – even school kids – have limited or no access to books. That's the reality for millions of people in the world today. Online resources like Wikipedia and social media channels are simply not available to millions of people. And, even if those people did know how to read and write, they would not be able to access the internet as they don’t know how to use digital devices. To add one more level of complexity, if these people overcame the barrier of literacy and digital know-how, there would still be little chance they would find any content in their native language.
By helping more people get online, Opera helps to educate more people around the world. We have partnered with Worldreader to make thousands of free books available to read through a mobile browser. In just five months, over five million people have read books with Worldreader and Opera.
- Affordability — The cost of going online is high
The cost for governments and telecom companies to invest in infrastructure is very high. Every rupee a telecom company spends on infrastructure must provide a return on that investment. For governments, the cost for mobile infrastructure may be hard to prioritize over hospitals, schools and roads.
Under-investment in infrastructure and lack of profitable business models creates high prices for low bandwidth, which again creates barriers for people to get online.
The cheapest way to get online today is with a mobile phone, presumably a Rs 2000 smartphone with a web browser. But, getting one of these “cheap” phones may be more difficult than it seems for many people.
Similarly, getting online is another herculean task for an Indian. An average Indian will have to work for 12 hours to pay for 1 GB of data, which is huge part of his or her salary.
When two people on the same Wi-Fi connection are both streaming videos or downloading large files, they will likely experience slow conditions due to the router’s lack of capacity.
The same thing happens when lots of people connect to the same cell tower. When thousands of people in Mumbai connect to one single cell tower, their connection gets slow and congested, making fast internet seem like a futuristic fantasy compared to their sluggish online experience, even though their phones show a 3G or 4G signal.
Another challenge is the large percentage of cell towers that are not updated to 3G or 4G. India’s population of 1.25 billion people is catered to by 390 000 cell towers, which means 3206 people for each tower. Only 56% users in India have access to a 3G or better internet connection, reflecting the fact that 2G is still a key technology here (Source: Open Signal). The result is unstable and unreliable connections throughout India. And, these problems appear in several other developing countries around the world as well.
And, it’s getting worse ...
The infrastructure in India will continue to improve during the next 5-10 years as telecom companies continue to invest. However, that will only help a small number of people, due to these two facts:
(1) India’s population is about 1.3 billion, but only 402 million people are online. Census data indicates that the India’s population will surpass China’s by 2025 and will be close to 1.4 billion. The growth rate of infrastructure improvements has to keep pace with the population growth.
(2) What’s even more important, the internet itself is growing bigger as we speak. Since 2012, the average web page has doubled in size due to larger images, more tracking tools, more ads, more complex and embedded code, and services such as social-media plug-ins (Source: Mobile HTTP Archive). This means increased load times and more data being transported through the world's cell towers.
Increased use of video and the rise of high quality images are expanding the amount of data flowing through the infrastructure of the web even more and are forecast to grow at a faster rate than mobile connectivity
For example, mobile video traffic in India could reach 190 million GB per month by end of 2016, up from 22.7 million GB per month in 2013 (Source: Deloitte). When hundreds of millions of Indians watch videos on YouTube over mobile connections, that means some serious strains on mobile cell towers, congesting them to an extent with which the infrastructure can’t cope.
To put it even more in perspective, Cisco estimates that smartphones consume 37 times more data traffic than basic phones, while 4G smartphones generate almost three times as much data traffic as 3G smartphones. The increasing use of mobile broadband-enabled smartphones will create a massive increase in data traffic, with volumes forecast to grow at 57% annually until 2019, an almost tenfold increase within the four years from 2015 to 2019.
Compression technology to the rescue
Opera has been working for 20 years to compress the internet and bring it to more people. The Opera Mini web browser has hundreds of millions of users across the world; today, this technology is more relevant than ever. Compression technology is one our most valuable propositions, a pure necessity to get more people online.
The data traffic is sent through Opera’s compression servers, which reduce the size of high-resolution images, and minimize the size of streaming video by decreasing quality that users won’t miss on a small-screen phone. This makes the desired web page load faster and consume less data, giving a better internet experience regardless of device or network conditions. So what we really do is to push out the “Opera Mini effect” to mobile cell towers, making the mobile network function better.
If every browser or internet service offered compression like Opera Mini, all the people who only have access to 2G networks today could actually surf the web as if they were on a 3G network. Also, network congestion would not exist, even in the world’s most crowded networks, as the data traffic would be reduced by up to 90%.
To bring a billion Indians online, we need to fix the internet’s most common challenges. One solution that we strive to provide is to make sure the internet is accessible for everyone by reducing the data traffic needed to experience the full web.
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