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Advice - Wireless Routers with decent parental controls

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Bobgroups

New Around Here
Hi,

I'm new to upgrading routers. My cable router hardly has anything i can use for parental controls.

I wanted to do following:

1. easily be able to turn off all wifi in the house and leave only wired on - this would be on a schedule e.g. after 9pm off till 7am
2. Turn of wifi instantly for a child
3. pause wifi for a child for say 30mins in 1 click
4. restrict games sites - my child access roblox which is a accessed from a website and i want to restrict that. From the Microsoft family sharing restrictions I tried doing that but it only restricts games and not games run from a website
5. easy to use phone app with parental controls

I'm thinking of going for Asus as it seems the phone app is easy to use

Is the above possible on this router

ASUS RT-AC88U Wi-Fi AC3100 Dual-band Mesh Wifi system Router with 8 Gigabit LAN ports​

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B019MKO43M/?tag=smallncom-21

Thanks
 
Hi Bobgroups,

There are a number of threads in the Lan, Security, and Wireless forums that discuss this at length. The search option "parental control" should reveal a few.
 
thanks I will do that. I was also wondering what's the best way to find out what the parental controls are like on that particular router before I commit to buy it. One of the things i would definitely want is schedule wifi to go off at set times.
 
Worst case, use a separate AP for wireless with a wall timer to kill the power.
If you force the kids devices to a fixed IP address (reserved ?), a simple time based firewall rule to deny any access, would also work. At least until the kids figure out how to spoof IP addresses or MAC addresses.
 
@Bobgroups I invite you to take a look at the pcWRT router. It has all the functionalities you listed above, except for #5. It doesn't have a phone app, but the router UI works well on the phone screen. Here's the demo site: https://demo.pcwrt.com.

I'm the developer for the firmware. Please feel free to ask me any questions.
 
@jswan thanks very much for this info. However i think we need a mobile app just so that we can quickly go on the phone and cut their devices. Would need to train my wife to do that and t would be easier for her to just launch a phone app and pause each kids wifi
 
Hi Bob, I am new to these forums, but have been using the Asus systems for may years.
I tried everything on the market back around 2015 and by far I found the Asus to be the best of the commercial brands. The functionality is not as precise as something like PFsence, but is really very good. You can set up each child with a schedule, so their devices drop from net access as you choose, and you have one click blocking. It will also target the child group you select, so it can be all the kids, or you can set up a group for each. My kids these days have multiple devices each (phone, laptop, kindle).
I also like the Asus because they have embraced the Merlin community and you can easily upgrade your firmware to Asuswrt-Merlin when you are ready, and it will not break the app or mesh functionality.
I would recommend you consider the AX version, as these tend to be long term purchases and although you may not car about WiFi6 today. that may changes as you get more users on your network.

for web game blocking the Asus has the ability to do very custom port forwarding and blocking, so it will be possible, but may require a little more research.
 
@Bobgroups There's not much difference actually. For a web page, you can add a bookmark to the page by tapping "Add to Home Screen" from your browser. Our web UI allows you to save the login password on the page, so no need to type in the password either. If you need to control when you are outside, you can enable remote control (without opening a port on your home network to keep your router safe & secure).
 
@degrub Disney Circle charges $9.99/mo. It uses ARP spoofing, which not only makes your network slow, but also easily defeat-able by a tech savvy kid (i.e., someone with decent Googling skills). I ended up returning the device because it didn't block Opera's builtin VPN.
 

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