The purpose of this website is to describe how a specially designed router can be used to effectively and efficiently manage a family's access to the internet.

Many households use WiFi equipped ADSL routers to access the internet. This enables laptop, nettop and smartphone users to access the internet from anywhere in the home. Athough this mobility is convenient it also makes it difficult for parents to manage what their child/children are doing on the internet.

A Family Router can be added to an ADSL router to achieve effective, inexpensive parental controls for all of a family's network client devices, both fixed (e.g. desktop PCs) and mobile. Parental controls are typically part of each separate device. Having them located in the Family Router instead enables the traffic for all client devices to be monitored and controlled from a remote location. These controls can be set to operate on the traffic for all devices or for each device individually. The diagram below shows a Family Router connected to an ADSL router. These two routers act together form a "Family Gateway".

Notes:

An ADSL router is just one of the more common devices used to connect a local area network (LAN) to the internet. Another is a cable router. The more general term for such a device or group of devices is "gateway" or "residential gateway".