Turning off BT Broadband Access Remotely

E

edewson

Registered
Hi all,

Hope this is the right area to post this question.

I want to control use of my home broadband connection when I am work so that I can stop my children accessing the internet at certain times of the day when I'm not there (for example when they are supposed to be doing their homework!). I thought a neat solution would be to log on to my BT account from work and change the password at the server end when I wanted to "switch off" the internet connection. I assumed that the password stored in our router (at home) would no longer be correct which would therefore stop the router connecting. I could then change the password back again when I wanted to "enable" it again.

However, it seems that wont work because apparently BT Broadband doesn't actually require a password to connect to the internet (I guess if you're connecting via your home phone line that's secure enough already).

I'd like to be able to do this remotely so that I can control the times the connection is "enabled" when I'm at work. I'd also prefer that my children don't know I'm doing it so I don't want to put any parental control software on the computer or change any of the settings on the router (in any case, they are pretty computer savvy so they'd soon work that out).

Hope someone can offer some advice.

Thanks
 
The problem is that once you disconnect your computer at home from the wan, there is not much you can do remotely if your work computer is not in the local network area. If you have several computers at home you could block the computer your kids are playing with from accessing the router and so the wan (for example by turning on MAC filters where the kids computer is not added). This way the wan connection will remain and you can remotely control your router settings.
I think there is no other way but changing the settings on the router or enabling some parental control options that are by default available on macosx. You can protect most of these settings with passwords so they can't change it back.
Anyway, if your kids are pretty familiar with computers how will you make them understand that "it's not your fault" they get disconnected from the internet while you are on work or when they are supposed to do their homework? I think they would figure it out very quickly and then you could actually consider changing the router settings or turning on parental control.
Hope this was a useful input.
 
Thanks for your reply Zammy-Sam. I think you're right in that there's not much I can do on the WAN side of things. Such a shame that you don't need a password to connect to BT broadband because I could just change that from the BT Website (in the same way that I might change my email password for example). That would have been an elegant solution but never mind.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.
 
Just a quick update for anyone who is interested. You DO need a password for BT broadband (despite what BT helpdesk told me) and it's the same as the primary email password. So, changing my primary email account password also stopped the router connecting which was the desired effect.

Thanks all.
 
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