Understanding Your Router's Admin Page

OK, so in our last router lesson we went over the basics of the hardware. Now we are going to take a look at the settings. You won't necessarily need to change ALL the sections of your admin page, but it is helpful to understand them and what they do.

The first thing we have to do is GET to the admin page. You will need to know your router's IP. It is 9 times out of 10 printed on a sticker on the back or the bottom of the router. It will be something like: 192.168.0.1. You will need to connect it to a computer via a wire for this set up process. Then open up your web browser; Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc. In the address bar type in the IP that we found on the router. You don't need to type www or anything like that. Just type the IP. It will then ask you for the user name and password. A lot of routers will have a default one that hopefully you know. If you don't try googling it. I had to look up mine and it was Admin/Motorola. Once you get into the setup pages, you can change the username and password.

First things first and it's a fun one!

Naming Your Router

That's right you get to name it. This is technically it's "SSID" or service set identifier. Have you ever searched for a network and seen all kinds of interesting options like "New Kids on the Block" "Rosco's Rocking Hot Spot"? Well those are SSID's that people designated. Mine is called "Sarah_The_Dinosaur". Why? Well because my favorite stuffed animal is Sarah and she is a dinosaur.

Choose Your Broadcast Mode

Like we mentioned in our speed test blog post, wireless N is the fastest. You can choose to broadcast both N and G but this will slow your speeds over all. If you can just broadcast N do that. But make sure that your devices are N compatible. All new devices will be. If you're not sure, just choose N and G. It might be called "mixed".

Security

This is an important one for obvious reasons. This is where you enter your password. Mine is a combination of letters and numbers. I use numbers for some of the letters. Like this:

S33 Jan3 4un f457 (make sense? It says: See Jane run fast)


 You'll have an option to choose what type of encryption. Generally the options are WEP, WPA, WPA2. WEP tends to be the easier setting to crack. Choose WPA2 if it's an option, choose WPA if 2 is not available.

So there's the basics. There's a lot more in there as you can see but this will get you in there and running safely with encrypted password protection! Call us if you would like our help and show you all the settings.