Parental Control Help. Child with Internet Obession

[silvinodino]

Hey all, I have a situation here regarding my girlfriends younger brother and his obsession with Xbox So let me explain this story:

Every adult in the household works normals 9-5 jobs so we are all gone during the day. The wifi bill has been insane due to the constant wifi usage over Xbox online games. So to counter that, we are using the built in Parental Controls to set a wifi limit of 2 hours every day. There is a total of 4 children in the house and every child obeys these rules we have put into place except one. 
 

During work hours he’s connecting his Xbox and by passing parental controls implemented by me. I can see his hours he’s used for today and it’s at 8 hours. It’s not fair to every other child how they obey the rules except him. One day he got really pissed off and slipped up and said “I’ll just change the IP” 

So I’m thinking he’s somehow changing the IP of his Xbox to allow him wifi access. Is he actually doing this or is he doing it some other way? He has a TV, laptop, and iPhone. Could he be using these other devices to allow him wifi access? (They don’t pay for hotspot on the phone so that’s ruled out) .
So my question is:

 

How do we stop this from a technological aspect? We want the ability to block wifi access across all devices without him trying to be some 1337H4CKER by watching YouTube videos. It’s extremely frustrating 

 

and please only technology related advice and not parental advice. Trust me I tried suggesting other methods already. 
 

This guy is obsessed with Xbox and will do whatever he can to be able to play online. Thank you for your time I really appreciate to anyone who can help! I’m the most technology-literate guy in the house so they always come to me about these issues and I don’t really know what to do anymore since these parental controls are obviously not working.
 

Attached is a screen shot of how the parental control panel looks with his devices grouped up and the play time showed

 

Thank you!

[Mr Technician]

Probably not what you're looking for but how are you being charged extra for Wifi usage? That seems unlikely as datacaps are generally quite high.

 

That said, trying to block him using technology will only encourage him to circumvent your restrictions.

[LWM723]

Simple. Lock the xbox up when you are not home in a locked box, or wherever. Even in the car trunk.

[tommy2712]

If he could change the IP, that means he has access to the Router, of which you need to take control.

-You must set password to your Router.

-Change LAN IP from dynamic to Static, then reserve the IP of the Xbox.

-Restrict access to the IP of the Xbox so he can still play offline games if he wants to.

Those things are a few clicks away from being done, just google it.

 

But he can still share the Wifi access from the Phone or Laptop to his Xbox, which I can't think of a way to prevent unless you're willing to block the IPs of those devices also.

 

[piratemonkey]

If you aren't concerned with him gaming, upgrade the internet to a plan without a bandwidth cap. If you are, then @LWM723 answer is the most simple. @tommy2712's solution is more elegant, and probably is the better parental solution.

Something like a DNS sinkhole (ie pihole) could work, but if he can pull those epic hacker moves he can probably change the DNS to the default. Whatever solution you choose, everything should only be accessible by you (strong passphrases ftw). Assume your kid can learn how to bypass anything, cuz he can learn how to

[Donut417]

4 minutes ago, tommy2712 said:

f he could change the IP, that means he has access to the Router, of which you need to take control

No. You can manually set IP info on each device. Every device I ever used allowed this. The only issue you could have is if you try to use an IP thats already in use. Depending on the router, the DHCP server might start in a place where a few IP's dont fall under the DHCP server. Those addresses could be hard coded in to the device relatively easily. For example my starting IP address for my router DHCP server is 192.168.1.5, thats means 192.168.1.2 - 192.168.1.4 would be up for grabs. I have static IP's set for my Plex server and NAS and desktop. Which is why those addresses are not used by DHCP. However I have seen routers start DHCP at 192.168.1.100. Thats a lot of IP addresses that could be used. 

 

 

52 minutes ago, silvinodino said:

The wifi bill has been insane due to the constant wifi usage over Xbox online games.

Playing games online doesn't really use that much data. Streaming video and downloading games however does. The problem you have is, if the kid is smart enough they will most likely get around any type of parental controls that a consumer grade router has. One option you have is to hard code all the IP's in to your devices and turn off DHCP. The issue here however is that isn't going to work well for all devices. 

 

I did look in to my routers settings. And it seems that I can setup time limits on my guest WiFi. But my router is a bit more featured than what most people would have, it costed $200. See if your router has an option like that. Because guest WiFi would use a separate SSID and if you have different passwords for your normal WiFi and the guest WiFi, the kid wouldn't be able to access the normal WiFi and get past the limits you place on the guest WiFi at least not without running an Ethernet cable to the main router.