Once you have a Wi-Fi broadband connection set up inside your home it becomes available to everybody provided they have your username (or SSID) and authentication key. People can hook on to your Wi-Fi connection from a laptop, smartphone or a tablet. If you cannot manually control the connections, even people in your neighborhood can access your Wi-Fi connection and cost you lots of money in case you have an upper limit on the usage of bandwidth.
Sometimes you don’t want people to access your Wi-Fi connection but you don’t want to tell them out of politeness or some other compulsion. For instance if you don’t want your kids to continuously log onto the Internet from their iPads and iPhones and if you stop them from doing that, they will throw a great tantrum. Why not quietly stop the Wi-Fi Internet connection on their devices and then pretend that there is something wrong?
With a little bit of tweaking, you can do that. You can stop certain people from accessing your Wi-Fi broadband connection and they won’t even know that you are doing it manually. Here is how to do that:
Find the MAC address of the device you would like to disconnect or connect. On your computer or laptop running Windows 7 you can easily find the MAC like this:
- Click the Start menu
- In the search box type “cmd” (without quotation marks) and press Enter
- In the DOS prompt type “ipconfig /all” (without quotation marks) and press Enter
- Whatever information is there opposite “Physical Address” is the MAC address of that computer or laptop. Note it down
On the smartphone or tablet PC you normally have to first go to “Settings” and then tap “About device” or “Device information” and from there you tap “Status”. There you will find your “Wi-Fi MAC address”. Note it down.
Once you have noted down the Wi-Fi MAC address you have to make appropriate changes in your Wi-Fi router setup. This setup you can access via the browser of your computer – preferably the main computer that is connected to your Wi-Fi router via a network cable.
Launch your preferred browser and go to 192.168.1.1. It will ask for the admin and password that you should know. Once you have logged in you have to somehow reach the section that allows you to manipulate your Wireless settings. Each Wi-Fi router may have different interface but normally it is under “Interface Setup”.
Scroll down until you have reached the “Wireless MAC Address Filter” section. By default the setting is deactivated. Click the “Activated” radio button.
Against the “Action” label you see a drop down containing “Allow Association” and “Deny Association”. Accordingly the information (the individual MAC addresses) will be used either to allow Internet connection or deny it.
Suppose you select “Allow Association”.
All the MAC addresses you put herein will be allowed to use the Internet. Whenever you want a particular device denied Internet connection, simply delete the associated MAC address and click “Save”.