How to find the number of connected devices to your wifi network?

You would want to find the number of connected devices to your wifi for one or another reasons. One of the most important being blocking the device connected to your network that you don’t recognize or block the devices that you wish not to be connected to your wifi. It can also be beneficial among roommates to ensure that someone is not having access to the wifi access for which only you are paying.

First of all, let us quickly navigate into the available features and configurations.

Steps:
A.Type “http://10.0.0.1/” on your web browser. Where 10.0.0.1 is the IP address of the router. Router connects you to the internet. This URL may differ depending on your router. 10.0.0.1 is the default private IP address of routers provided by Xfinity. It uses this private IP to setup routers on a network in order to provide internet access.
Making a request to above mentioned URL allows you to access the settings of your router and control many features such as:

1. Connected Devices feature displays number of connected devices to your network , both active and inactive

2. Parental control allows you to block certain websites for your children. you can also block certain keywords. Under this feature, you can also allow only the trusted computers to be under your network/wifi and block the unknown devices.

3. Advanced features include Remote Management. Remote Management settings allows you to control remote access by letting you enable only the devices that want to give access for remote connection. There are 3 options namely allowing for remote access only from 1 computer, allowing access from multiple and allowing from any. As expected setting up remote access from any computer option gives you the warning message like this “Note: This option will allow any computer on the Internet to access your network and may cause a security risk.”

4. Troubleshooting lets you change the password for accessing the configurations of your network. You can also use the logs to troubleshoot issues and to identify potential security risks. There are 3 kinds of logs, system, event and firewall.

5. Gateway feature displays wifi configurations that comprises of your wifi name and password.

B. The request will fetch back a webpage that will ask for your username and password. The default username is ‘admin’ and password is ‘password’. It may differ, you can call your ISP above credentials do not work or google for possible username and password combinations that are frequently used. Once you are logged in, you will land on the page with title Gateway > At a glance which has your wifi configurations i.e. Wifi name and password. While there are many features listed on the webpage that you just logged in. We are interested in finding the number of connected devices to your network to answer the question of this post.

C. The page will consists of “Connected Devices” section at the bottom right underneath which you can see the list of connected devices. You can click the “view connected devices” under the the same section to learn more about the connected devices. Alternatively, you can also click on “Connected Devices” feature listed on the left hand side of the page, the second feature and access the same the same information you got from previous approach.

D. Once clicked, you will have the information on the online devices as well as the offline devices connected to your network. Under “Online Devices-Private Network” title you will have list of Host names(name of devices connected to the network) that are clickable. Click the device name and you will see important details about the device , one of which is IPv4 Address. You can verify if this IPv4 address is same as the IP address of your device that you expect to be connected to your wifi. For Mac users, Your device’s Ip address will be listed under the ->System Preferences ->network . You can find Mac logo () at the top left corner.
you can be reassured that the device connected to your network is trusted if the IP address of the device listed under the “Host names” is same as the IP address of your device. If you have some devices that are listed under the Host names but you don’t possess such device or IP address does not match to the IP address of the Host names listed, then it is red flag. It means someone has access to your wifi credentials that he/she is using to access to your network. This is a security threat because it also means they will have access to all the configurations that they can change to their malicious intentions. So, make sure you change the password that you use for login to access configurations details using the Troubleshooting feature, the fifth and the last feature. Also, enable the Parental Control -> Managed Sites -> enable -> Trusted Computers ->(yes/no) feature to block the unknown device. Details on the following section’s ‘feature c’ i.e. “Trusted computers”.

You can explore other features I listed in Step A. Parental Control feature is beneficial to prevent your children from having access to certain websites, certain keywords and even block them from using the internet by blocking their devices from your network to limit screen time. You can play around with those features and figure out pretty quickly if or how they work!
Let me walkthrough the steps quickly:
1. Click on “Parental Control” feature.
2. It will display page with title “Managed Sites” that has clickable options “enable” and “disable” right next to the title. Click on enable.
3.It will display three features.
a.Blocked Sites: use this feature to add the websites you want to block. It will provide you with the option to add URL you want to block, option to let you block the desired site forever or set the date and time during which you wish this website to be blocked.
b.Blocked keywords: use this feature to add all the keywords that you wish to filter either for yourself or for your children. It also has the options similar to above feature i.e. option to add keywords you want to be blocked, ability to block such keywords forever or specific date and time that you feel the need for such keywords to be filtered. Useful especially for preventing children to google harmful contents .
c.Trusted computers: use this feature to label the device trusted or not trusted. It has 3 options. First is “computer name” under which you have list of devices connected(They named it “computer name” but all devices listed under this title are not necessarily computers), their IP address and “Trusted” option which allows you to toggle between “yes” and “no”. yes would mean that the device is trusted.

Thats’ all!

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