I would like to use kid-control function to limit son’s game time on his mobile. Limiting to a specific times isn’t suitable. I would prefer relaxed rules - e.g. one hour a day of full internet speed with good ping time. He could use it in time chunks (e.g. 15 minutes in the afternoon and 1/2hour in the evening). After the given time is used I would prefer the router to decrease speed and increase ping time.
Any ideas how to achieve this? Or would kid-control be implemented in a way to allow similar scenario?
Powered devices connected to a network are generally communicating on the network in varying degrees. How would the router know if your kid is using it or if its a background process using the network? Run a packet capture on your network and visualize the traffic. Generally network traffic is pretty constant on most devices.
Mikrotik hotspot might be able to do this to some degree.
Definitely there is a difference among background processes only traffic, standard browsing (searching the web) and activities I would like to limit (watching youtube/playing games).
It can be seen from LED blinking patterns, on graphs on wireless interface.
I can post some graphs. Which ones would you prefer?
I think hotspot is probably the method that’s tweakable to your needs. But making your argument based on LED’s and Graphs begs the question what are they displaying? LED blinks when there is network activity. This means any activity not specific activity. Traffic graphs also display traffic. Check out the tutorials on how to setup hotspot and test it out.
But just my feeling - when mikrotik is adding kid-control functionality to its system - it should make it easy for “normal” parents to setup limits.
One doesn’t have to be a networking guru to tweak some other functionality to suit this purpose.
It is an interesting question for sure. Perhaps they could integrate a simplified hotspot feature to limit the session time in a 24 hour span. You should post it in the feature request section.
A really good layer 7 firewall would fit your needs. But maybe you need a turn on turn off switch. then you might script something, or make a website with an on/off switch on another device, connectiong trough api, ssh or something, and run some commands enabeling and disabeling your need. This also depends on how “smart” your kid are - its always possible to somehow passtrough this if some traffic always is accepted. eg a VPN tunnel
For an end user wanting kid control, you may want to look into https://www.mcpnetworks.us/. They seem to be transitioning to more ISP level business. They may still let you get setup on their program. It’s a cloud portal for the end user which then programs the MikroTik router. You may be able to use your existing MikroTIk. You’d just have to reset it to defaults with their base config. Then the service costs $X per month.
If they don’t want to deal with end users, an ISP in your area may be on the program. There’s not really any reason you have to be on a particular ISP’s network to use the service. An ISP I work with is beginning to use their service on hAP AC-lite units. The owner of that ISP may be willing to offer the Aerez service to out of network users, if you cannot find a more local provider.
I have already implemented on/off switch - I have 2 mikrotik devices, one of them is “hap ac”, the other one “map lite” powered by PoE. Wifi functionality is activated only on “map lite”. If I need to switch wifi off, I just unplug “map lite” and hide it in appropriate place.
But I have only found options to limit transferred amount of data. My idea is to limit time of gaming on mobiles, not to limit transferred amount of data.
I am trying to create suitable traffic monitor snapshots and find some patterns that would make it viable to asses what’s going on during the given time period. Then I would love to have the possibility to configure the device to allow e.g. 12 slots of 5 minutes time to allow unrestricted gaming during a day. If a child uses mobile for gaming that it would count how many time slots in given day were used for gaming. If more than allowed limit, it would make gaming unusable (increasing “ping” times).