Back in the day, an unexpected bill racked up by your kids was most likely something like a broken window after a game of cricket gone wrong. As technology became a bigger part of daily life, it became important for parents to sit down and have a chat with their kids about using a mobile phone responsibly so they didn’t make calls to premium numbers or use tons of excess data.

Fast forward to today and microtransactions in games are becoming a serious problem. They’ve been a common pest in mobile games for a few years now, but thanks to the massive popularity of “free to play” games such as Fortnite, more parents are learning about them the hard way.

Fortnite is a battle royale shooter game that made waves when it was released on mobile devices, making it extremely accessible. After all, most kids are more likely to have a mobile phone than a certain gaming console or gaming PC. Fortnite doesn’t cost money to start playing, but a number of in-game items such as different costumes for your character to wear cost V-Bucks, which are actually bought with real-world cash. A quick Google search will show you there’s already dozens of stories of kids blowing hundreds of dollars on the in-game currency.

Fortnite isn’t the only game to have a big microtransaction problem and mobile phones aren’t the only device you may need to lock down to stop kids racking up a bill on supposedly “free” games. To help you (and your wallet!) we’ve put together a guide on how to stop kids making purchases in games across a range of devices including mobiles, tablets and gaming consoles. Just follow these steps for some peace of mind that your littles ones won’t be making any in-game purchases, by accident or otherwise.

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Did you know that global usage of disposable plastic bags is now at 5 trillion and up to 1 million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute? In fact, half of the worlds plastic goes towards single use items!

On top of this, one third of plastic packaging used doesn’t even make it into our collection systems and is instead polluting our environment. The plastic that ends up in our oceans can circle the Earth four times in a single year and can continue to do so for 1,000 years before it fully disintegrates! With 13 million tonnes of plastic entering our oceans every year, this represents an alarming threat to our marine life.

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In order to help Australians make informed choices when it comes to the NBN™, Internode is amongst the first Internet Service Providers to follow recommendations from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to advertise typical evening speeds for NBN™.

These speeds measure the typical download speeds nationwide between 7PM to 11PM (local time). This is when the network is busiest and performance issues such as congestion are the most likely to occur, so measuring speeds during this period provides more realistic information about the speeds you can expect to experience on the NBN™.

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