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Forum Discussion
Parental Controls
Are parental controls coming to the XR500 Gaming Router?
46 Replies
- It is something we are thinking about for our roadmap. Meanwhile you can use Block Services/Sites and schedule internet downtime in Settings.
Sounds good.
I have tried that but I need to schedule individual devices. I have children and scheduling on and off times is important.
- Totally understand, it's something we're looking into. Could block individual devices manually on Device Manager.
what settings, and in the Netgear Genie app or...? I'd like to turn off the internet for my kids every day at 11.
- The settings I mentioned before are in Settings > Monitoring but it will turb off the internet as a whole. For now the best bet would be to block the devices individually on the device manager.
NG nor Duma post when new features maybe coming out. They'll appear when the FW is released to there download support site.
This is a gaming router meant for the gaming community and gaming customers. NG and Duma probably didn't want to inlcude any parental controls as this router seems more directed towareds gamers and gaming experinences.
You can direct your concerns to NG about adding features here however:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-For-Home/idb-p/idea-exchange-for-home
If you need a router that does have parental controls, you should probably looking into a non gaming router like NG's R series routers. There good at gaming as well as they do have parental controls.
Good Luck.This really is one of the better all around routers in it's price range for the functionality it provides - you can either overpay for other gaming-focused routers, or overpay for the Asus RT-AX88U on the family side which has first gen WiFi 6 capabilities (and first gen anything is never worth it). Or you can reach back to the RT-AC88U which Asus may stop updating firmware since it has been out for 4 years now. The others (TP-Link, Synology, etc.) offer clunky OSes that do not compare. My point here is that while you aren't accountable for those other technologies, your product is positioned in a unique price-point for its features EXCEPT for the presence of Parental Controls. That is literally the only thing preventing me from clicking "Buy" on Amazon on this router right now. You really should get a suite of tools (or work with a vendor and buy theirs) to add to your interface. Take the loss now for current models and add $10-15 extra to next generation of routers to recoup costs.
Did some digging and found Firewalla - Netduma-Fraser Netduma_Jack , have either of you guys seen performance data when stacking with something like Firewalla? I know that it requires that you turn off DHCP on the XR500 for it to be compatible (https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009401874), but will that negatively affect any of the automated services (or by a negligible amount)?
Needless to say this is a significant disapointment to me.... I have seen your company advertise the parental control features of the "Nighthawk App".. this was the reason I selected your brand. But to then sell a "nighthawk" router (all be it, a gaming router) that doesn't offer the enhanced features that you using to market the nighthawk brand is just down right rediculous and manipulative in my opinion. I don't see how this can not be priority number 1 for your company, seeing the number of parents with kids that "Game".
- Netgear promote their router and handle hardware, we just handle the DumaOS part of the router. So I would suggest contacting Netgear directly if you have concerns over that. Our focus initially was to bring out a true OS for routers that allows us flexibility on the features we can add. We needed to first include the features our previous software did (pre Netgear) and get that all working, so now we can/are looking at the bigger picture and are understanding what people want and how we might achieve that.
- If who ever answers the forums on here would please let the higher ups know we are asking for this instead of giving the generic answer “it’s on the road map” yes. I’m sure it is on the road map and I’m sure it’s not a priority. But I think if someone higher up maybe a supervisor or a dev knew this was in high demand they could copy some quick code over even if sloppy. It would suffice and be quick and later down the road map they could fix it up.
Just please let someone up there know.. thank you.
UPDATE:
I made the decision to move back to a non-gaming router. The performance and features of the XR500 are both disappointing and worthless. I use the FingBox to manage all users and devices from my cell phone. The app works whether I am at home or away so that is a nice bonus. I have week night and weekend schedules for my kids and can shut off their access with the push of a button. The Zing app also notifies me when a new device joins the network. My kid's devices are assigned to them individually, so I can manage their access to their IP technology on an individual basis.
Since I switched routers the reliability of my home network has improved significantly. Combined with my ZingBox I have all the speed and control I ever wanted. Unfortunately the DumaOS application just does not live up to the current needs of parents with children.
- Sorry to hear you've changed routers but glad you've found something that works for you. I hope that when our parental controls are released you'll consider coming back as it should be very powerful!
Sooooooo............any updates for parental controls
