While the EU has indeed made progress, we’re a long way from popping the champagne corks and declaring a famous consumer victory.

Look, for example, at the data rates. The EU’s new rules still allow mobile networks to charge up to 1 Euro (86p) per MB for data downloads when roaming. That’s £880 per GB! To put that in perspective, BT charges £15.65 per month for a 10GB data download allowance on its Option 1 package; mobile networks can theoretically charge £8,806 for the same amount of data! And I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that the costs associated with mobile data are an order of magnitude higher than they are for fixed line providers.

You might also want to reflect on the charges for SMS text messages. While the EU has now capped the cost of text messages to 9p (down from 24p), that’s still 9p for transferring only 140 bytes (0.000133514MB) of data. That’s a princely £674 per MB.

Dr Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester last year claimed that sending texts from a mobile phone was four times more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Telescope, and that was based on an average text message fee of only 5p.

So while the EU can take some satisfaction from today’s price cuts, mobile data prices are literally still out of this world.

Vodafone might have thought it was a nice piece of face-saving PR to cut the poor chap’s bill down to £229, but as PC Pro forum member Amnesia10 rightly commented on the article, “From £31,000 to £229!!!!  How could it afford to write this off?  If it were a genuine cost it would not write it off so easily.”

Quite. So we asked Vodafone how it managed to wipe more than 99% off the bill? A company spokesperson assured us that Vodafone did take a financial hit on the write-off. How much? She wouldn’t say.

Anyone want to bet it’s £229?

Update: Vodafone says the bill was actually from last September and new measures put in place since then would have prevented our intrepid Prison Break fan from running up such a colossal bill.