Mobile broadband plans used to come in two flavours - 'bugger all data' or 'expensive as buggery'. They were chiefly used by metro home businesses with plenty of cash to burn. Thankfully, those days are now over.

It's something I've been hearing about for a while - the NBN rolls into a neighbourhood and RSPs offer plans that are no better than what people had with ADSL or HFC... but they end up paying more. The practice has now come to the attention of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) with the commission's boss saying the impact on low-income families is significant.

When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web he wanted to make it easier for engineers, and eventually all people, to openly and freely share information and ideas. But three decades later, the web of today is very different to what Berners-Lee imagined. He says it's time for "mid course correction and get going off, again, in a positive direction". He spoke about this during the closing of the first day of Oktane19.

NBN Co's 'Check Your Address' page used to be pretty useless. But the site was recently overhauled to provide more detailed information to users. You can now find out when your residential address will be connected - and what technology is being deployed - at the click of a button. Here are the details.

Most of us have a reasonable understanding of how the internet works - but it can be notoriously difficult to explain in plain English. This infographic from Internet.Frontier does a pretty good job of breaking it all down in easy to understand language.

Setting up a computer for your grandparent or parent can be frustrating, especially if you’re trying to do it over the phone with them. If you can actually get your hands on the computer, though, you have an opportunity to make their internet experience way better.

Everyone wants fast internet, but unfortunately, getting speedy NBN isn’t as simple as it should be. There are so many factors that can affect the speed and quality of your connection, and no one wants to be stuck with a service that craps out during peak hours.

The World Wide Web turned 30 this week, and everyone celebrated the best way they know how — by coming up with big lists of all the internet-related topics we’ve dealt with (or obsessed over) the past few decades.

Which Android app is worth a spot on your new smartphone or tablet? Trying to find the very best of the best is a challenging process, because there are millions of apps to pick from on the Google Play Store. Even if you just scan Google’s “top free” or “top paid” list on a daily basis, you’ll miss out on a lot of digital gems. Allow us to help you out with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for Android.

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

Finding a great VPN service can be a challenging task—and that’s putting it mildly. It’s not hard to find any VPN service. There are plenty of apps that promise to encrypt your connection by shuffling it through a third-party server, causing your requests to appear as if they’re coming from said server (even if its halfway around the world) rather than your more easily identifiable device.

A typically geeky holiday might sound something like this: You wake up on the morning of December 25, run down to your Christmas tree, unwrap everything in a frenzy, plug in all your long-awaited gadgets, connect them to your wifi, and speed past the installation screens (or manuals) to start having all kinds of fun.

Trying to find the perfect iOS apps can be tough, and we’re willing to bet that your iPhone or iPad is full of pages and pages of apps. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to come up with a short list of favourites. We understand. Allow us to help you with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for iOS.

Getting mad online is an important part of internet culture, but it can be hard to predict exactly what is going to set the masses off. (This year, it was coleslaw, anything Nick wrote about MoviePass, the flu shot, and many other fun topics.) Here are our most angry-email inducing posts from 2018.

In late 2017 I signed a thirty year mortgage on a house in Melbourne's northern suburbs, in an area due to be connected to the NBN in "early 2018". With the ink barely dry on the contract, NBN Co announced it was halting all planned rollouts until further notice. Cable was not available in the area, so I assumed my only option was ADSL.

I started my writing career off over a decade ago at a site called DownloadSquad. We covered “Web 2.0” companies back when “Web 2.0 companies” was a term people used. I wrote a zillion posts for them, or at least a few thousand. The amount of those articles that are still online: zero.

Free DNS provider Cloudflare recently released a brand-new app for iOS and Android, “1.1.1.1,” that makes it incredibly easy to route all of your device’s DNS requests through the service’s speedy servers, not your ISP’s (likely slower) servers. In other words, this should make your web browsing feel faster. Better still, Cloudflare says it doesn’t store any data about what you’re browsing—unlike your ISP, potentially. What’s not to love about that?

By 2020, every household in Australia is expected to connect to the NBN - and those who don't will have a raft of telecommunications products and services switched off. The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) has put together an infographic explaining five things you need to know to ensure the big switch runs as smoothly as possible.

Ads and in-app purchases have become so prevalent in the games our kids play on their tablets that experts are calling them more than just distracting—they’re labelling them as “unfair” and “deceptive.”