The UK's largest online marketplace and auction site, eBay, has claimed that the country is being damaged by poor Mobile Broadband coverage and has called on the communications regulator ( Ofcom ) to ensure that its forthcoming auction of superfast 4G ( LTE , WiMAX etc.) compatible 800MHz and 2.6GHz radio spectrum is fully designed to plug the gap.

eBay's study, which was conducted by Verdict Research and submitted as part of Ofcom's on-going consultation on the related auction process, claims that 16% of mostly rural parts of the country show significantly weaker mobile internet spending than the national average. As a result the UK economy could be missing out on at least £1.3bn from mobile shopping.


Indeed eBay claims that mobile shopping, assuming all of the aforementioned holes are plugged, could deliver a £4.5bn boost to the country's economy by 2016 and a further £13bn by 2021.

Patchy coverage, poor reliability and slow speeds aren't the only elements holding the mobile internet back. The study also claimed that 80% of consumers perceived the cost of mobile broadband as being too high, which is despite the UK being one of the cheapest places in the world for mobile data access (here).

eBay's demands also chime with those of the Conservative MP for Penrith (Cumbria), Rory Stewart, whom recently lead an important House of Commons debate (here) on rural broadband and mobile coverage. The MP called upon Ofcom to resolve the problem by raising the Mobile Broadband coverage commitment on its new spectrum licences from 95% to 98% (an extra 2 million people).

Ofcom has been reluctant to do this because the enhanced commitment could cost an extra £215m and might potentially discourage some operators from bidding or at least limit the amount that they are prepared to spend. Critics of this position suggest that it would be a small price to pay for such a huge improvement. The auction and spectrum release process will not complete until the end of 2013.