When you decided to take an online medical coding class, you splurged a little bit and purchased a new laptop to aid in your un-tethered study-lifestyle. After all, online medical coding classes are best executed if your computer is speedy and not prone to “hang ups” due to overtaxed system resources or worse, crashes and the dreaded blue screen of death. So how come you’re noticing slowing speeds with respect to page loads while
navigating through your online medical coding class materials?
It may be because someone (or several people) are logging on to your wifi network without permission, using up bandwidth and slowing your browsing experience; all on your dime! Yes, stealing wifi is a thing. And there are steps you can take to find out if unauthorized users are logged on to your network and to boot them off if you find any. According to Jess Boluyt at the CheatSheet.com, “One way to see what devices are connected to your Wi-Fi network (and to check whether you recognize all of them) is to log on to your router’s administrative page and check its
DHCP Client Table,
DHCP Client List, or the list of
Attached Devices. From there, you’ll be able to see all of the computers, smartphones, tablets, and any other devices connected to your wireless router.” If you see a strange/unknown device shown on the Attached Devices list, that’s good evidence your connection is being slowed by a parasite neighbor mooching your internet service to stream Netflix (or worse).
In addition, if navigating through your router’s administrative page seems intimidating and scary, there are a number of simple apps to help detect wifi free riders like
Netgear’s Genie,
Linkys Connect, or Apple’s
AirPort Utility for iOS.
Once you’ve determined there is a lazy freeloader pilfering your precious bandwidth, booting them off is as easy as changing the network password on the router and then updating all the authorized devices in your household to use the new password to authenticate. The next time the moocher tries to logon, the password they’d been using will no longer let them onto the network. And you’ll be back to lightning-speed learning with the rest of your online medical coding class.
