How to set a scheduled disconnection on the router? My child secretly played with his mobile phone in the middle of the night, so I set a switch in the background to automatically turn it off at certain times.

The cause of the incident was the boy in the family who was in junior high school. Two weeks before the final, I got up at two o'clock in the middle of the night to drink water and found light coming from under the door of his room. Pushing the door open and going in, he was watching the game live broadcast with his phone covered under the quilt. Confiscate it. It will be inconvenient to contact me at school the next day. Why not confiscate it? I can't bear to check my phone myself. It's a bit overwhelming to expect a fourteen-year-old child to be self-disciplined.

After thinking about it, the root cause of the disease is not the person, but the WiFi. There is a scheduled WiFi switch function in the background of the router. It is set to automatically turn off at 11:30 p.m. and automatically turn on at 6:30 in the morning. There is still a signal on the phone but there is no network. The child will naturally fall asleep while watching videos and spinning around. I worked on this matter in two nights. I ran into a trap on the first night, but I figured it out on the second night. I wrote down the process for reference for parents who also had the same headache.

Think clearly about what to break first: WiFi scheduled shutdown and device disconnection are two different things

Set the goal before taking action, otherwise it is easy to make mistakes. The "disconnection at the point" that the router can do is actually divided into three layers::

The situation in my family is that even adults use their mobile phones aggressively, so one size fits all is fair, so I chose to turn off WiFi at a scheduled time. But a word of caution: If you have a camera at home, choose this one carefully. I set it up the first night, and opened the mobile app the next morning to see that the living room camera was offline for eight hours, and the doorbell was not recorded. Something really happens in the middle of the night. Monitoring is blind, so you have to weigh the risk yourself. For families with many cameras, it is safer to use parental control to only disconnect the children’s devices. I have specific ideas here. Guest network and child Internet management It was written in that article.

Universal entrance: Where is the WiFi timer switch hidden in the background?

Regardless of the brand, the path is basically "Go to the backend → Look for menus related to wireless settings or timing." I set up each of the three machines in my hand.:

TP-LINK new interface (that of TL-R479GPEM): Open browser 192.168.1.1 , enter the management password. There is a "Wireless Timing Switch" in the "Application Management" on the left. Click on it to see the setting page for the switch and time period. You can check the days of the week for the recurrence period to take effect. TP-LINK with the old interface is in "Wireless Settings→Wireless Timing Settings", the function is the same but it looks old.

ASUS (I use RT-AX56U): Enter 192.168.50.1 In the background, there is "Professional Settings" hidden under the "Wireless Network" tab on the left. There is "Enable scheduled wireless shutdown time", and you can set the shutdown period. ASUS's entrance is really deep. I spent ten minutes searching in the system tools for the first time but couldn't find it. I almost thought ASUS didn't have this function.

Xiaomi and Redmi: There is no such switch in the background of the web page. You have to install the "Xiaomi WiFi" App and look for "Health Mode" in the toolbox. It turns off WiFi regularly and sets time periods according to working days and rest days. This entrance has been tested on my Xiaomi AX3000T, but it cannot be found in the Mijia App, so I have to use the Xiaomi WiFi App. I have written a detailed article before about the specific path, see How to turn off WiFi on Xiaomi router regularly .

For both Mercury and Tenda, the web backend is called "WiFi Timing Switch" or "Timing Management." You can basically find it by looking for the word "Timing" in the routing settings or function menu. The specific pages of the two companies are different. I have written about the process of Mercury version and Tenda version respectively. Mercury WiFi timer switch setting , Tengda is here Tenda WiFi timer switch setting . The optical modem dial-up and router only provide secondary connections, and the WiFi on the optical modem layer must be turned off separately. Otherwise, the timer switch only controls the router, and the optical modem hotspot is still on and you can still access the Internet. This pitfall is Telecom Tianyi Gateway WiFi Timing Switch It's written in it.

How to determine the time period: Don't copy my eleven-thirty

The time period is important, and I revised it three times before settling on it. The first version is set to stop at 11pm and start at 7am. As a result, things went wrong on the first weekend - my children wanted to watch a replay of a football game on Saturday, but at 11:01 the whole house was cut off from the Internet. My own mobile phone was also cut off from the Internet, and I had to turn on the data to check anything. The second edition was changed to 11:30, but I was still unhappy because I worked overtime until 12 o'clock when I got home and tried to cast a video but couldn't.

The final version is divided into two sets: weekdays and weekends.: From Monday to Friday, it is from 11:30 pm to 6:30 am, and on Saturday and Sunday, it is from 1 am to 8 am. In this way, my child can go to bed at the same time during the school day and take it easy on the weekends. It won't affect me when I come home from working overtime in the middle of the night. The background of most brands supports checking by day of the week. When setting up, don’t be lazy and only set up one set.

One more detail: Don’t turn on your phone too late in the morning when the internet is out. My neighbor's home was disconnected until nine in the morning. As a result, his children's mobile phones were disconnected before leaving for school. Even if they wanted to scan the QR code and take the bus, they couldn't. The children went to the school gate to borrow the teacher's mobile phone to call their mother. The end time of the morning is set before getting up and going out, which is a safe time.

You must verify it once the night after setting it up. Just seeing the switch light up does not count.

This is the step I want to emphasize the most. After setting it up on the first night, I saw the background switch turn green and went to bed, feeling that it was done. As a result, at two o'clock in the morning the next day, the light in the child's room came through again. When I went backstage, I saw that the switch was still green and the time period was correct, but the WiFi was not turned off at all. After a long investigation, I found that the router system time was wrong - the machine was powered off and restarted once, and the time returned to the early morning when it was shipped from the factory. The set "11:30 p.m." seemed not to be the time for the router itself.

The router's time is maintained by batteries or capacitors, and cheap machines will be lost when the power is cut off. So that night after setting the timer, be sure to wait until the network is disconnected to test it with your own eyes.: Use your mobile phone to connect to WiFi to watch a video, and at some point the video will really stop spinning in circles. If you don’t want to stay up late, temporarily change the time period to five minutes and then switch it back to the official time period after the test. Take a quick look at the system time on the backend homepage to see if it matches the Beijing time. If not, correct it first. I later wrote a special article to investigate this pitfall of time, see The router time is wrong and the scheduled network disconnection is not executed. .

Another benefit of verification: Can detect accidental injuries. I scanned the whole house while the Internet was disconnected, and found that the 2G traffic channel of the child's phone and watch was not affected (this one uses the mobile network, which is normal), but the desktop computer at home with the network cable plugged in also still had Internet access - the WiFi was turned off but the wired network was not turned off. If you want to disconnect the wired connection at the same time, you have to use parental control or add the wired device to the disconnection list. A pure WiFi timer switch cannot control the network cable port.

No matter how strict we are, we can't stop those who use the Internet.: Clean the equipment before timing

There is also a hidden premise for scheduled network disconnection: All devices connected to the router must be known to you. If the neighbor's child is using your home network and your WiFi is turned off in the middle of the night, and he goes home to sleep on his own network, and your child gets up in the middle of the night and searches for other people's hotspots that are not turned off and continues to play, this trick will be in vain. The day after I set up the timer, I went through the list of online devices and found three phones marked Unknown, one of which was connected to but not deleted when my child's classmates came to play. How to identify the device list and how to mark the names. I wrote an article about identifying devices based on the first six MAC digits. See How does the router recognize each device in the background? .

If you don't know the device, you will block it directly, and if you know the device, you will leave a comment. If someone is really cheating on the Internet, first change the WiFi password and then block them, a two-pronged approach. The operation of blacklisting and how to get it back if you make a mistake, in How to block devices on router It’s all written in that article. If you are worried about your children using data to watch short videos during the day, the router cannot control it. You have to set the screen time of the mobile phone. What the network layer can do is not to let the WiFi operate all night.

Finally, I’ll give you a handy list, just follow it and you’re done.

1. Go to the backend of the router and compare the system time with the Beijing time. If there is a difference, calibrate it manually first. ；
2. Think clearly about which layer to cut off: Use WiFi timing across the board for the whole family, use parental control only for children, and give priority to parental control for those with cameras ；
3. Set up two sets of time periods: One set for weekdays and one set for weekends, with the ending time in the morning before going out. ；
4. After saving, check it once that night, or temporarily change it and test it after five minutes to confirm that it is really disconnected. ；
5. Go through the list of online devices and block those you don’t recognize. Don’t let those who use the Internet bypass this set of controls.

It takes about twenty minutes to do this, and the result is that the whole family will be clean after 11:30 every night. The child still had objections in the first two days, saying that it was not convenient to check information. I said it would open at 6:30 in the morning. What information do you want to check that the school cannot check? After a week of humming, I got used to it. Later, his head teacher told me that the child stopped dozing off in class, which sounded more comfortable to me than running a speed test with full gigabit speed. If the problem of bandwidth shortage at home is not only in the middle of the night, but also serious during the day, then you should read another article. How does the router limit the speed of the device? , speed limit and scheduled network disconnection are used together, one controls the day and the other controls the middle of the night, each controls a section.