Opera Software has produced an infographic that claims to show where growth is happening in the mobile web.
As you can see Asia and Africa are the fastest growing regions, in terms of percentage of new users and absolute growth.
However, as Opera Software says in this blogpost, there’s still a divide between developed and “development markets” in terms of affordability of mobile data. Breaking down that divide, Opera says, could help connect the “next billion”.
For example, to purchase 1 MB of data consumers in development markets must spend 12 times the percentage of their per capita GDP as U.K. or U.S. consumers.
For Opera Software, of course, that plays into promotion of its compression and optimisation platforms – less data to transport means more affordable mobile internet access, and perhaps more efficient transport over slower networks. Also, many of these customers are on pay as you go plans, which puts them on a per-Mb tariff – making efficient optimisation of data pretty desirable.
So, although we tend to think of mobile networks as a pure coverage and capacity play, worth remembering that there are techniques that can effectively “expand” a network. In Opera’s case, it says that has been to the tune, to date, of 116 libraries of congress.
