Lockdown your wireless router with these tips

It’s a stunner how many people don’t protect their router. As more and more of us do sensitive stuff on home networks, you need to reconsider that. You don’t want freeloaders that will slow down your connection.

PCMag.com reports there are five easy ways you can secure your wireless router. At the top of the list is a no-brainer: Put a password on your router.

Among the other suggestions are to disable broadcasting of your router name, and to disable guest access, particularly if you don’t have frequent guests at your home.

Other tips include adding a MAC address (which is a unique number for your individual router) so you need the address in addition to the password to get online, and using a network monitoring app like Fing to ferret out any unwanted guests using your bandwidth.

Meanwhile, if your ISP is advertising high speeds yet you’re seeing something different when you’re surfing, the problem could be with your router.

If you have router that’s older, it’s probably not robust enough to handle the capability of the Internet connection coming into your home.

The proof is in the pudding. Plug a laptop into the DSL or cable modem and bypass the router. That’s a surefire way to see how fast or slow your connection speed really is.