France Telecom currently has approximately 80 million customers across Africa and it will now commence work to ensure that phones sold by its operators there are pre-installed with the web browser.
The company has said that slow data speeds on African mobile networks have made it difficult up until now to support web-browsing. This new browser is expected to ease the burden on networks by using specially written code that reduces the amount of data that has to be passed back and forth when visiting popular websites.
France Telecom has taken the decision to partner Baidu due to the search firm’s track record of helping mobile networks in its home market of China cope with a similar switch from basic mobiles to low-end smartphones.
