Life & Technology – 2GB 21st June, 2015

Telstra’s been trialling a free public Wi-Fi service over the last seven months, but on Monday that came to a close. The hotspots – designated by a pink dome at a public phone – are being de-activated. These will remain offline for a couple of weeks, at which point they will be upgraded and return as a paid-for-service. Telstra has yet to confirm pricing.

 

HotelTonight is a new app that's just launched in Australia for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone and it's designed for spontaneous, discounted hotel bookings. What's interesting about it is that that if you're nearby a hotel, you can see even bigger discounts for hotels in your area. I can't see myself leaving bookings up to the last minute when travelling, but the idea's great for a last minute weekend away.

 

Netgear this week announced its first Nighthawk-branded modem router combo, the Netgear Nighthawk D7000. We’ve talked about Netgear’s Nighthawk line a few times before – the name is used to designate its high-end, high-performance products – but this is the first time Netgear has made a Nighthawk device with an integrated modem. Click here for more information

 

Cars are getting smarter and smarter – to the point where they're becoming computers on wheels. Is this a security risk? I had a chat to Tim Falinksi from Trend Micro Australia about this very question and the threat is very real. Listen to our podcast for the full interview!

 

In other networking news, Linksys has just launched its latest router in Australia – the EA8500. Also known as the Max-Stream AC2600 MU-MIMO Smart Wireless Router, the EA8500 is the first router to utilise MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple Input, Multiple Output) technology. Theoretically speaking, MU-MIMO is designed to allow multiple devices to simultaneously reach the router's maximum wireless speeds, rather than sharing the bandwidth between them. It's on sale now and available from our sponsor Harvey Norman for AUD$429.95.

 

We’ve seen some interesting research about the future of the internet come out of Cisco this week; essentially, it looks like you’re going to want a lot more data in 2019. The average household will be using as much as 100GB of data per month in 2019, a massive 172% increase for 2014.

 

When you consider streaming, that makes a lot of sense – I’m already using more myself.

 

This will amount to a massive 984 Petabytes per month in 2019 from just households alone, the equivalent of 246 million DVDs per month.