The easiest way to protect the whole house is on the router: the box that broadcasts your Wi-Fi. One setting, and every device that connects to the Wi-Fi is filtered: phones, tablets, laptops, the smart TV, the PlayStation or Xbox, and the friends’ phones that come to visit.
How it works
Every time a device opens a website or app, it first asks a DNS server where that website is. If you change the router’s DNS addresses to a filter, all those questions go through the filter, and the filter simply does not answer for websites you have blocked.
Step by step
- Open the router’s admin page (often
192.168.1.1or192.168.0.1; the address and password are on a sticker under the router). - Look for DNS under Internet, WAN or LAN/DHCP.
- Replace the two DNS addresses with your filter’s, and save.
- Switch a device’s Wi-Fi off and on again, and open a website to test.
Die Ratel’s conversation shows the exact steps for the most common routers in South Africa (Huawei, ZTE, TP-Link and MikroTik), and can even draft an email to your provider if the router is locked.
What a router filter cannot do
- It only applies on the home Wi-Fi. On mobile data or at a friend’s house, only a setting on the phone itself helps.
- It cannot treat each child separately, unless you also set up per device.
That is why many families combine both: the router for the whole house, and the phone setting for the children’s own devices. With Die Ratel you do both in one conversation, and the first 7 days are free.