This means that roaming fees should be abolished by June. The caps were the last thing to be negotiated for the abolition of retail roaming charges as of June 15, 2017, crowning a decade of efforts by Brussels to allow its citizens to use their phones abroad without paying extra.

All going well, and it presses ahead with Brexit, the UK will be cheerfully paying whatever the phone companies want, meanwhile in the EU data prices will be much lower.

Wholesale charges for data - which were the most controversial given the exponential use of mobile internet - will be capped at 7.7 euros per gigabyte from June 2017, going down to 2.5 euro per gigabyte in 2022.

This means that Caps for making calls will decrease from five euro cents per minute to 3.2 euro cents per minute, while those for sending text messages will halve to one euro cent from two euro cents from June.

The European Commission - the EU executive - will review the wholesale caps every two years and propose new ones if necessary. Wednesday's deal still needs to be confirmed by the full European Parliament and member states but it is certain they will approve.

The EU had to overcome a split between northern and eastern Europe where consumers have mobile data at low prices and want lower wholesale caps to avoid companies raising prices in their home markets, effectively making poorer customers subsidise frequent travellers.

But the southern countries, which depend on tourism ,didn’t want to have to hike their prices to recover the costs of accommodating the extra tourist traffic.

There were some worries that a compromise would not be made, but it seems that pressure to do something for the great unwashed, rather than just making life better for business, managed to influence negotiators.