Parental control advice needed

I currently use the homehub with BT BB option 3 which has worked very satisfactory for a very long time now.

This is connected to my home network which has 4 PC/laptops, 2 network print servers and 2 Landisks.
My current setup works great.

I am very interested for any advice on preventing my kids from using windows live messenger and internet access at night times (Parental Control).
I use to use a linksys router and this was very easy to setup and use within the linksys router settings. However i can not see this setup on the homehub.
At the moment i have to switch off the router at night times and switch back on in the mornings.
The homehub boots up very slowly.

Any advice and comments would be very gratefully appreciated

If your router is secure from your kids and you are not using wireless you could just unplug the relevant network cables.

BT have a separate software for this found here: http://bt.software.yahoo.com/yupd/p/index

It works extremely well not sure if it reports back Windows Live messenger chats but it can prevent internet access after a certain time it is software so set the account to limited. They also need to have a BT Yahoo! e-mail address under your main account for it to work but it works very well once its going and its very easy to configure.

Parental controls work whichever router you use, I've used BT's controls myself and found then to be very reliable. They can block messenger services. They can also send an email to you to authorise sites the kids request and give reports on usage.

However savvy teenagers may well suss out that you can uninstall the parental controls through add and remove programmes so it also requires the permissions on the pc to be changed to prevent this.

Edited by deleted (Thu 14-Jun-07 23:13:52)

Many thanks to all for the replies.
On my old setup with the linksys router you would go into the router setup pages and limit the usage or block certain applications to the kids PC ip address. I was unable to find this in the HH.
I will try the BT parental controls tonight.
I can't use my old router as i want the BT Vision product and the sales team stated that i must use the HH.
Also the HH for me has been very reliable

I have installed the BT parental controls a few times and found them to be excellent.

The other thing that I counsel user to do however is talk to their kids.

Let us know how you get on, they take a little bit of configuring but they are good. Say its a special occasion say new year your kids can request that their time is extended and they set the amount to ask for so too much and the get nothing too little you think give them a little extension and its all temporary.

If they are trying to get onto a website which is blocked and need it for school you can manually allow it as well.

Note: When I installed the parental controls it didn't like my AVG firewall and kept turning it off as it creates a firewall type idea to block websites etc as it works with ANY application not just the usual suspects. In that case you may need to install and download Norton Firewall free or the entire internet security suite which BT provide free of charge.

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The other thing that I counsel user to do however is talk to their kids

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I agree, software has its uses but I wouldn

From what i've heard the vision will work with any router.

The reason they want you to use the Homehub is the homehub sets the QOS (Quality of service) on the upstream for the v-box so that it doesn't get affected by other stuff.

The downstream QOS is set at BT's end and it is possible to use vision without the Upstream QOS however without this QOS setting that the V-Box puts on the homehub its possible that heavy use of the upstream would disrupt the VOD playback due to the Acknowledge packets getting delayed

Well their is that to be set but it turns off the downstream QoS when its finished with the Vision on demand session. Other routers do not know how to tell the exchange equipment to turn off the session and it gets left on until you power cycle your router and Vision box and leave them off for 10 minutes.