Opera, one of the world’s leading browser developers, today announced the successful installation of its new local servers in Mombasa, Kenya. These servers, the company says, will significantly increase browsing speed up to four times faster than before. The millions of Kenyans who use Opera products, such as the popular Opera Mini browser, will enjoy a faster experience when accessing their favorite online content.

Hopefully the company will use this opportunity to work on the annoying ads on their browsers as a way to draw more people to their platforms.

The new data servers are located in the iColo.io MBA1 data center facility, chosen for its strategic location, ability to cool high-performance computing, and its local and international connectivity.

“Kenya is a hyper-connected country with 86% of its population already online. The challenge is supplying users with uninterrupted and quick internet connectivity,” said Krystian Zubel, IT Director at Opera. “With the installation of our local data servers in Mombasa, we are improving connectivity speeds and meeting the needs of millions of connected Kenyans.”

“We feel privileged to be supporting Opera in their African growth and efforts to improve connectivity across Kenya. Using our strong community of connectivity partners, content delivery networks and global networks in Mombasa, Opera can reach their end users in the most reliable manner,” said Ranjith Cherickel, CEO at iColo.io.

With the installation of the new local servers, Opera is promising to reduce connection latency and to provide Kenyans with swifter browsing. The company claims that according to the test results, the response time to servers has significantly improved, with a 4x increase in response time for users with the fastest network conditions. In addition, they say, overall browsing has become even faster with the implementation of intelligent caching mechanisms.

“Every day, Kenyans browse more than one hundred thousand web pages with Opera Mini using the data compression capabilities of the browser. By enabling the data compression technology of Opera Mini, and connecting to the local data server in Kenya, Opera will make every load page request faster, saving an amazing total of 4400 hours of time waiting for webpages to load. This improvement comes on top of all the great speed gains already provided in Opera Mini.“ Reads the official release from the company.

Opera Mini is currently one of the most downloaded browsers in Kenya on Android devices. During the second half of last year, Opera Mini reported that users in Kenya saved more than one million gigabytes in mobile data, which translates into over two billion KES saved in mobile data.

“Data costs keep representing a major challenge for millions of people across Africa as it limits their ability to access the internet. In Kenya the cost of one gigabyte of mobile data is twice as expensive as in Nigeria. However, Kenyans enjoy better internet speeds than Nigerians and those in other African countries,” said Zubel.

The company says the installation of the new Opera data servers in Kenya is part of Opera’s strategy to continue to lead in the digital transformation of Africa. Remember they’re currently facing a lot of scrutiny for having extremely high interest rates on their loan products, and using unscrupulous methods to raise cash from innocent Africans and Asians.