Today Opera Software released the findings of its monthly "State of the Mobile Web" report. Among the many tidbits of data shared is that Opera Mini saved its 35.6 million users $8 billion in data fees, and processed 2 petabytes of data.Opera gives us a peek into its growing presence in the mobile world by sharing a lot of statistics and data about what users of its mobile browser do. Let's look at the data that concerns the U.S.

Opera's Mini browser compresses data up to 90%. So a web page that would be 100kb is instead squished down to 10kb. Opera says that users in the U.S. and U.K. save the most money with its browser. It notes that data typically costs $2.00 per megabyte. This represents people who don't pay for unlimited data plans. According to Opera's numbers, the average person using Opera Mini in the U.S. consumes 6 megabytes, which translates to $100.10 saved each month (Opera's math, not mine) if they had used whatever native browser was included with the handset.

That represents a significant monthly savings. It's not only helping users, of course, but the operators as well, which don't have to push as much data to their customers. This lessens the stress on their networks. Opera doesn't quantify what sort of savings the operators realize in dollar figures. That would be interesting to know.

In sum, Opera's servers processed some 2.1 petabytes of data and squished it down to 887 megabytes. That led to a cost savings of $8.1 billion to its customers around the world. Perhaps the most noteworthy statistic is that Opera now serves 500 million Web pages per day to its users. That's a lot of Web browsing.

Snapshot: United States

• Page-view growth since September 2008: 309.4%
• Unique-user growth since September 2008: 122.7%
• Page-views per user: 247
• Data (compressed) transferred per user (MB): 6
• Data (compressed) transferred per page view (KB): 23
• Yahoo had its best showing (at position 3) since May 2008.
• BBC debuted on the list at position 10.

Top 10 sites in the United States (unique users)

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. yahoo.com (7)
4. myspace.com (3)
5. wikipedia.org (4)
6. my.opera.com
7. cnn.com (back on the list)
8. youtube.com (5)
9. espn.go.com (8)
10. bbc.co.uk (new)

Top handsets for September 2009

1. BlackBerry 8330 ("Curve")
2. Samsung SPH-M800 ("Instinct")
3. LG CU920 ("Vu")
4. Samsung SPH-M810 ("Instinct S30")
5. BlackBerry 9530 ("Storm")
6. Nokia 3110c
7. BlackBerry 8310 ("Curve")
8. BlackBerry 9000 ("Bold")
9. BlackBerry 8130 ("Pearl")
10. BlackBerry 8320 ("Curve")