Gave someone your Wi-Fi password, and they now have unlimited access to your internet? Have they connected multiple devices to your Wi-Fi, creating a lot of traffic? Have a neighbor steal your Wi-Fi, slow down your internet connection, and max out your data limit? Well, lucky for you, you can kick them off your wireless network.
To kick someone off your wireless network, you can change your Wi-Fi password, use a guest network for others to connect, or use MAC address filtering.
In this article, we’ll discuss all three methods in detail. By the end of this article, you should be able to kick everyone stealing your Wi-Fi off your wireless network.
Before You Start
Before you make any changes, we recommend that you confirm if someone is stealing your internet. You can log into the router and see all the connected devices.
Not sure how to log into your router? Check your router’s user manual or search for your specific router online.
Alternatively, you can download Wireless Network Watcher, a free program that displays all the devices connected to your Wi-Fi.
Once you have a list of connected devices, you can easily recognize any device that’s not yours. In other words, you can easily single out why your Wi-Fi has been acting up lately. And then, you can kick them off your network.
How To Kick Someone Off Your Wireless Network
There are three ways to remove someone from your network. We discuss these three in detail below:
Method #1: Change Your Password
Changing your password is the easiest, quickest, and most convenient way to ensure others don’t use your Wi-Fi. Of course, once you change the Wi-Fi password, your devices will disconnect, too. You’ll have to reconnect them by entering the new password. Anyone without the new password can no longer connect to your Wi-Fi.
You might find this method annoying and frustrating if you have many devices connected to the Wi-Fi since you’ll need to reconnect them all.
You’ll have to access your Wi-Fi router’s configuration settings to change your Wi-Fi password. This usually involves signing in to a web interface and changing the Wi-Fi password.
However, how you can change your router’s password differs from one router to the other. So, review the user manual to determine how to change it.
Method #2: Use a Guest Network
If you’re sharing your Wi-Fi password with a guest, you should set up a guest Wi-Fi network to make things easier for yourself. A guest network is a separate access network such that your guest won’t have access to the main network.
Most routers come with this feature in the settings – they might even call guess access. You can have a completely different password for the guest network and change the guest network’s password without changing the password of the primary network. This way, you won’t be kicking out your own devices from your network when you change the password.
You can even go a step further and isolate the guest network from the main network. This way, the guest devices won’t be able to access network-connected resources like file shares. This feature has multiple names – it could be called isolation or even a checkbox with the text “Allow guests access to local network resources.”
You’ll have to explore the settings to check if your router has a guest network. You can also search it online using your router’s model number or check the user manual.
Method #3: Use MAC Address Filtering
Some routers come with access control features, allowing you to manage the devices that can connect to your Wi-Fi. All wireless devices come with a unique MAC address, and you can ban certain MAC addresses from connecting with routers. Some routers also allow you to set up a whitelist of approved MAC addresses. This automatically prevents other devices from connecting.
However, there are some problems with this method. Your router might not have this option, and it’s not completely secure. For instance, someone who has your Wi-Fi password can change his device’s MAC address. Since the new MAC address isn’t blacklisted, he can easily connect to the Wi-Fi again. Plus, for every new device you want to connect, you must manually enter the MAC address.
This is a good method if you just want to kick off a device temporarily.
You will have to explore your router’s settings a little to see if it supports such a feature. It can have different names; for instance, some routers call it the access control feature, while others call it the wireless card access list.
Summary
We understand how frustrating it can be to have someone else hog up all your internet. But you know three simple ways to kick someone off your wireless network. So once you change your password (and use a guest network and set up a MAC address blacklist for good measure), we’re sure that you’ll no longer experience laggy, slow internet!
Frequently Asked Questions
Most router configuration pages allow you to remove someone from a network, but how you can do that differs from router to router. Alternatively, you can use an app like NetCut to boot off intruders from your internet.
