Do I monitor my home network usage? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
This is one of the many questions
that I've gotten over the years and that I'm answering regularly at
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Here's the question.
I have three kids, each has his own computer.
I have a laptop and we are all sharing an internet connection.
Sometimes one of the kids hogs the network
and everybody else does not get any bandwidth.
I sometimes want to lock out one
of the kids from the internet so he will turn to other activities such as homework.
So this is a really common question
and the answer turns out to be really frustrating, especially since it's been 19
years since this question was originally asked.
Like I said, it's common, it gets asked over and over again.
But the answer honestly hasn't really improved that much.
Monitoring what's happening on your PC? Not a problem.
I got a tool for that.
Monitoring what's happening on your
entire network, that's where things get complicated.
So on your PC, I'm going to point you
to an article, how do I monitor network activity in Windows?
It's going to show you how to use the Resource Monitor
tool that's built into Windows 10 and 11 that will basically let you see what
program is running, what they're connecting to,
what the bandwidth being used by that program is, and so forth.
So you can really get an accurate picture
of exactly what it is that your specific PC is doing.
And yeah, you can do that with each one of the PCs in your house.
But unfortunately, that does mean that,
well, yeah, the kids are going to know you're doing it because you're playing
with their machine in order to look at their network usage.
That doesn't really solve the question that you're asking.
What you really want is something at the router level,
something at the internet connection level that will tell you not only
what all is happening, but which of the computers on your network
is actually responsible for all the traffic.
And unfortunately, that's the answer.
A router that's smart enough to present you with usage reports.
The frustrating part is that, again, after close to 20 years of this being
a very common question, it's really difficult to come across
that a router in an affordable consumer level way.
In other words, your home router, your natural home router,
even small business routers, will often not have this capability.
Even if they do, it can sometimes be exceptionally, I'll just call it obtuse,
to configure and to understand the results.
There really isn't a great solution for the home network.
Now, here's a picture, for example,
of some monitoring on my network here at home, but I've gone high end.
I have a fairly high end router situation that provides me with this information.
Even then, it's still
difficult to understand what's happening at a point in time, but I've at least got
a high level understanding of which machines are responsible for what.
And yeah, I've got 38 to 40 devices
connected to my internet between the computers, the phones, the IoT devices.
I totally get wanting to understand who the heck is using the internet.
Another solution, and this one, it's
possible, but it does require, I'll just say, some commitment
on your part, is using network monitoring software.
There is network packet sniffing software,
it's called Wireshark, is the example that I use a lot,
that allows your computer to be configured to watch and report
all of the internet traffic that happens to cross on its network connection.
Here's the problem.
Networks, network equipment
tries to be very, very smart about how traffic is routed on your network.
So for example, as you sit in front of your PC,
even if you're running packet sniff software, you may not see
the traffic from your kid's computers because your router is smart enough
to realize that while that's between the kids and the internet.
Your computer has nothing to do with it so
there's no point in sending it down your internet connection.
That's what a home network looks like.
You've got a very simple situation
where you've got a wireless router, you've got a couple of PCs connected to it
with a network, you've got some wireless machines connected to it over WiFi.
All of the information is going through the router and the router is smart enough
not to bother your PC with traffic that's destined for some other PC.
That means you can't see the traffic.
There is a way.
Now, one of the things that I have talked
about before in an article about the difference between a hub, a switch,
and a router is that a hub is a very dumb device.
What it does is it says
anything that comes in one port gets sent out to all of the other ports,
which sounds like an ideal scenario for monitoring.
But first you have to funnel all
of the traffic through the hub, and that's what this diagram is all about.
We've replaced the router in the center of the picture here
with a simple switch and a separate wireless access point.
All of that is collecting all of the traffic and sending it through
a hub which in turn is connected to your real router and the Internet.
That means that all of the traffic for all
of the computers is running through that hub.
And since the hub is sending everything it
hears out every port it has, you can then connect another PC
to that hub, install something like Wireshark on it
and monitor all of the traffic on your network.
Again, it's not for the faint of heart,
as you can see, not only does it take some network reconfiguration on your part,
Wireshark itself isn't for the faint of heart either.
It's a pretty dense piece of software,
but that's the level that it really takes to get the detailed
information about what's going on on your network.
Honestly, my scenario is to do the best with what you have.
Keep an eye on the kids,
disconnect them if possible, understand and let them know that they're
causing problems and maybe have some consequences for that.
But to actually monitor and potentially even turn off individual
stations by some algorithm really requires more hardware
and more configuration than most consumer level solutions have.
I'm sorry, but that's where we still are even this many years later.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.