Opera Mobile Accelerator

Edd Dumbill wrote about his analysis of the recently launched Opera Mobile Accelerator. Mobile Phone Users can use a proxy server hosted by Opera through a montlhy subscription fees for getting optimised content saving bandwidth and cost benefit. I had a previous entry on the same topic here. Here is what Edd writes :



I decided to take the Accelerator for a spin on my Sony Ericsson P800 phone, running the Opera 6.31 browser. Setting the proxy up was simply a case of entering the URL of an auto-configuration page. Thereafter I browsed as normal.

The speed-up you get will depend on the content you read and how much Accelerator can optimize it. To see if Accelerator lived up to its claims, I performed some experiments. I tried three different sites: my own weblog, BBC News and O'Reilly Network. The latter has adverts on it, which introduces some unknowns into my measurements.

I tested the amount of kilobytes my phone had to send and receive over GPRS in order to load each page. I am charged by total data transfer, so the sum of these is the key figure. I didn't test download times, as there were too many variables involved to get an objective measure.

Here are the download results.

Site	Normal (KB)	Accelerated (KB)	Improvement
My weblog	8 + 52 = 60	8 + 32 = 40	33%
BBC News	59 + 135 = 194	26 + 36 = 62	68%
O'Reilly Network	27 + 135 = 162	34 + 92 = 126	22%

Note that the cache was cleaned and Opera restarted before every load.

So it looks like I'm getting savings in bandwidth between around 20% and 70%. At the top end, this is definitely consistent with Opera's claim of 70%. At the lower end, however, it looks like Opera's 50% figure is a little optimistic.

The savings afforded by the Accelerator definitely improve when used in conjunction with your browser's cache. I performed the experiment again for my weblog, but without cleaning the cache:

Site	Normal (KB)	Accelerated (KB)	Improvement
My weblog	8 + 36 = 44	7 + 14 = 21	52%

Of course, when browsing on my P800, I don't always start either with no cache, or a full cache. Neither do I always have image loading on, as I did for this test. It certainly is the case that I save bandwidth by using Accelerator, whatever the conditions.

Continued.

So, crunch point. Will Mobile Accelerator pay for itself? I often use a lot of GPRS data, but more often through fetching my email over a Bluetooth link to my laptop. Accelerator only works with web content, obviously, so how much do I need to browse to make a saving? Opera are offering the service at 3 Euros per month. Given that I might expect to get around 50% data saving, this means the break-even point is 6 or more Euros worth of GPRS in web browsing.

The complete entry is over here.