If you’ve ever been stung by unexpected charges for sending or receiving texts or making calls when abroad, you’ll be aware of the increased cost of roaming charges and if you’re lucky, will have gotten away without too much damage to your bill.

While mobile phone providers do make an effort to inform customers of increased charges, they are often difficult to police, something which an executive couple who took advantage of an unlimited Vodafone broadband package will find difficult to forget in a hurry.

The wife of a UK city executive recently started a download of four episodes of the popular sitcom ‘Friends’, which in this country wouldn’t have cost a penny. Unfortunately her unsuspecting husband took the phone to Germany on a two-day business trip, where the free deal wasn’t applicable and instead incurs charges of £4.20 per megabyte. The total cost of the download was £11,050 and while Vodafone usually alerts customers when bills rise above a typical level, these warnings are far slower to materialise when roaming around Europe. The chief executive of Ofcom, an industry regulator and communications watchdog, said that they would be investigating the fee, and that higher retail charges abroad must be justified or they would have to disappear, a move that would no doubt be welcomed by consumers.