My router has got two different wifi signals?

daniellaoxox

One is unprotected and is called NETGEAR and the other is the password protected one I use. I have noticed that whenever I connect to the password protected one it also tries connecting to the NETGEAR one - what's going on??

macman

Model of your Netgear router? Some allow a separate guest network to be set up.

JJ_Egan

Mine normally have two as its dual band router .

jje

Nilrem

As has been said, depending on the model of the router you can have multiple wireless networks, either because it allows a "guest" network (people connected to that get access to the internet, but not your home network), or because it's a dual band model with the option for different names for each band (IE you might want to name the 2.4ghz band "home24" and the 5ghz one "home5").

My current Asus router allows up to 6 or 8 wireless networks across it's two bands (I think it's something like any combination of up to 3 networks per band).

You probably want to go into the control panel for the router (check the manual, or sticker on the router for details), and either turn off the secondary network, or at least add a password to it.

macman

But very poor if the router is set up for unsecured access on any network by default.

JJ_Egan

macman wrote: »

But very poor if the router is set up for unsecured access on any network by default.

Do not they just come out of the box as no settings unless network supplied .
Or do the suppliers leave default security on ??
Must admit i never notice as i always setup from factory default .

jje

kwikbreaks

I think most are now secure by default with the SSID and key on a label.

Judging by a short stroll around my home with an Android phone running Wardrive the worst offender for default open networks is (was?) Belkin as there are plenty of open networks near me with Belkin in the SSID.

macman

I thought that all new routers come with some version of WPA enabled by default?

kwikbreaks

I think most new ones do but there are loads of old ones that had a default of open still out there that have never been secured. It's the large number of completely open ones out there that make me smile when I see folks get in a panic about WEP encryption.

Cycrow

i used to work for a company installing networks in student houses. The area we worked in was primarily a student area. There were alot of wireless networks around, and none of them were secure. some houses you can easily access 10 or so different connections.

The only ones that were secured were the ones we installed.

This was at a time when wireless was fairly new

brewerdave

macman wrote: »

I thought that all new routers come with some version of WPA enabled by default?

...If the router is supplied by the ISP then usually yes....but I bought a new DLink for a relation last year to replace their old router and that came out of the box unprotected altho' the wizard talked you thru setting up WPA2 during the connection process -I think I could have skipped wireless security if I had really wanted to.......:)
Must admit that I used to be able to see a number of open networks round here ...but now there aren't any!:D