NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Hi NetGear,
Just recently bought my new Nighthawk X4 NetGear Router and am very happy with it.
However, 1 small suggestion, which i'm sure most tech savy owners would back me on, is a better ability to time control certain devices on the Network.
Unsure about some home owners, but I have youngsters who don't particularly listen very well, so I tend to put blocks in on Sunday to Thursday nights to cut off the internet in order to prevent them streaming NetFlix or playing online games when they're meant to be asleep!
Although it is possible to do with the current services available, it's a slight pain in the arse.
To begin with, I can't restrict via MAC Address. Although not currently a problem, do get this done I have to ensure their devices remain on a single address rather than just allow DHCP to do it's job and let the MAC Address get blocked which never changes.
After this, I notice the "Blocks" are simply port blocks for services. Although this too is fine to deal with, the specific timed access I was hoping for doesn't exist. For example, Friday isn't a school night, so staying up late isn't a problem for me....But Sunday would be, despite being a weekend. This router doesn't allow me to specify that and simply gives days and a time frame, which is no good and results in me lifting the block manually over the weekends. This too also wouldn't be a problem, if it allowed me to add multiple different blocks and multiple time frames for multiple devices, but it doesn't.
At the moment i'm fortunate enough that all the bed times are the same, but i'm sure this will change at some time, in which case the blocks will need to be different per device.
Is this a good suggestion or is it already in the cards? I can't imagine i'm the first one to suggest this.
Or does it already exist perhaps and i'm being thick and not seeing it?
2 Comments
- I suggest you upvote the same suggestion posted at https://community.netgear.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-For-Home/Feature-Request-Block-or-allow-individual-devices-based-on-time/idi-p/985728.
Even third party firmware has settings to block mac and ip address on time schedule. One step pass just blocking mac and ip addresses I would like to see websites and search key words be included to web site should not see.
