Airtel and Opera Software have signed a global deal to offer a customized Opera Mini mobile web browser to its subscribers across India, South Asia and Africa. Following the deal, a co-branded version of the browser will be availble for Airtel mobile subscribers. Opera had earlier inked a similar deal with Idea, Tata Indicom and MTS in India, and Vodafone in India, South Africa, Turkey, Tanzania and Egypt, to push its browser. The browser will now be offered on Airtel's own app store, App Central. At the time of writing this post, we tried using Opera Mini 7.0 on a Nokia E5 with an Airtel connection and found that it offered shortcuts to Airtel Live, Airtel Selfcare, Airtel.com and Airtel's Mobile Gaming pages on the Home and on the Speed Dial tab. It's interesting to note that shortcuts for the Airtel Live and Airtel App Store have been present on versions of the Opera mobile browser since February. How these deals work in favour of telcos: Opera Mini significantly reduces data consumption costs since it claims to compress data by up to 90 percent, making it ideal for low bandwidth networks, or in places where data costs are high. So telcos, benefit from increased data consumption, since subscribers who were not data customers earlier, start using the browser on the premise that data costs would not burn a whole in their pockets. These new users get included among subscribers contributing to data revenue. On the other hand, telcos that offer a large amount…
