Is the UK's mobile internet too slow?

Have you ever tried to get online on your smartphone on a city commuter train and watched your connection grind to a halt despite a strong signal as everyone else does the same? Or tried to do anything serious online from an intercity train? Or even tried to browse the web in an out of the way place? You probably don't need me to tell you that mobile internet access in the UK can be patchy, to be polite.

Some new research by eBay, quoted in this article by Startups.co.uk, goes so far as to say that this is costing the UK economy around £1.3bn a year in lost e-commerce sales because people simply give up trying to complete their transactions.

It certainly can be extremely frustrating trying to do anything online if you're using a mobile. Apart from the general slowness of mobile connections, the mobile user experience on a lot of websites is lacking.

While smartphone screens are beginning to have a good enough resolution to make regular websites readable, the design of the sites themselves often make them very hard to use on mobile devices. Often, especially if you have fat fingers like me, you need to zoom in just to use the navigation. And frequent page loads combined with slow connections can make you give up on some sites as the loading bar sits stationary again...

We still have a long way to go before these amazing little devices in our pockets give the same experience as a proper computer with a proper network connection. The way we're going to get there is by companies like eBay who stand to make the biggest gains, and the consumers who are queueing up to use their services, pushing the network operators better connections. eBay have made a formal complaint to Ofcom, which is a start. A supposedly high speed connection taking a minute to load a page just isn't good enough. But there also needs to be a responsibility on the web design and development community to think about how their sites will be used on a mobile, and to push their clients to this mindset as well.