My kids have been staying up way past their bedtime watching videos, and I need a way to monitor exactly how much data their phones are pulling from our home network. I tried poking around my router’s admin settings to get a device breakdown, but honestly it’s super confusing and doesn’t give me the clear history I’m looking for. Has anyone found a straightforward tool that easily shows which devices are hogging the bandwidth and when?
Hey dpmedeiros, welcome! Honestly the easiest win here might be skipping the router headache altogether and just using Google Family Link (Android) or Screen Time (iPhone) directly on the kids’ devices — they’ll show you usage by app and let you set a bedtime cutoff that actually kills their internet access automatically.
If you really want the router-level view, Circle is pretty much the go-to recommendation around here — it plugs into your network and gives you a dead-simple dashboard showing exactly which device is doing what and when, and you can schedule “lights out” for specific devices.
Fair warning though: a determined teenager will just switch to mobile data, so the parental controls on the device itself are usually the more airtight solution. 