NetGear NightHawk charges £45/year for Parental Controls

cdh321

NetGear new app NightHawk on the £100+ routers eg R8000 now blocks access to free parental control and makes your purchase Disney Circle at £45/year to protect your family with access parental controls, so unless you pay £45/year access is blocked automatically switching devices at night. :mad:

I had a lot of routers before no where does it say you have pay extra to get access to parental controls, I thought I had reviewed the product well before paying £150 for the R8000 only to find out access the features you get for free with other manufacturers you have to pay another £45/year.
Even if you don’t use the NightHawk app and log direct onto the router you can switch off Disney Circle and use direct standard DNS Parental Controls but this not work, or allow you set up rules, if try use the old app NetGear Genie it just stats upgrade to NightHawk.:(

Any smart people :A out there that know a work around as I adverse to paying Disney to protect my kids.

Neil_Jones

Free solution, here you go:
https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/
Follow the links to the OpenDNS Family Shield.

Some details about it:
https://www.howtogeek.com/79998/protect-your-kids-online-using-open-dns-2/

Basically you configure your router with new DNS settings and that's it.

Chino

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Basically you configure your router with new DNS settings and that's it.

Apparently not because the OP has already tried changing DNS settings:

cdh321 wrote: »

Even if you don’t use the NightHawk app and log direct onto the router you can switch off Disney Circle and use direct standard DNS Parental Controls but this not work, or allow you set up rules,

Neil_Jones

I interpreted "DNS Parental Controls" as a router option (like "Disney Circle") so presumably there should be a way to enter manual DNS entries.

Forwandert

If you have sky broadband and are on the new packages released a month or two ago they have broadband buddy (its reskinned circle by disney) think its £2.50 a month, it also includes a version of circle go. Not free but much cheaper. I just upgraded yesterday to the higher speed and ended up paying the same price with buddy included and a faster BB.

My nighthawk is in the box ready to go back tomorrow as it was dropping signal like I've not seen since being with virgin media years ago and it didnt mention the subscription, although probably would have continued paying if I didnt notice Sky had the same thing. Circle is the best software I've used for more control over what the kids are doing. Could even set their ps4s to watch Netflix, Sky go etc and block online games like fortnite. All their equipment off whenever we wanted without having to remember or just one persons off for the day.