Europe has quietly agreed to ban mobile phone roaming charges last night
Paying through the nose to upload pictures of your hot dog legs to Instagram is about to become a thing of the past, after the EU quietly agreed to do away with them altogether.
Read more: Three scraps roaming charges in four countries
Yep – while most of the Eurozone was locked in a room trying to thrash out a deal on Greece, members of the European Parliament – including Latvia, which is credited with brokering the deal – have been trying to come to an agreement to abolish the charges, which force tourists to pay more to use their phones when they go abroad.
But alas, this won't happen in time for this year's getaway: the new deal won't come into effect until June 2017, council members said.
The new deal will apply to all 28 European member states, allowing travellers to use voice, text and – crucially – data when they're abroad.
From April next year, charges will drop to five euro cents (4p) a minute for calls. two cents per SMS and five cents per megabyte of data, excluding VAT. That's roughly a quarter of the current caps for charges.