Control Over Network Access

Larwrence

My friend has another internet provider that competes directly with Verizon. She has a router feature that prohibits access without her permission. If someone tries to log onto her network, she get a notice on her smartphone asking for her permission to allow access. If she clicks on "NO", access is denied. How hard can it be for Verizon to offer a similar feature?

gs0b

Verizon routers have a Guest WiFi network. It does not have an access to resources on the main network. For the use case you describe, the solution is to give visitors the password to the guest WiFi network.

Any devices you see on your main network either are directly connected to a wired coax or Ethernet cable, or through WiFi. If they are on WiFi, they were configured with a WiFi password. Anytime you give a device a WiFi password, that a direct approval for the device to connect to your network.

As for the new-hosts, a little searching of their MAC addresses will reveal the device manufactures. Grab the MAC addresses from the router's connected device list and google the first three octets (xx:xx:xx) or find a site that does MAC address manufacturer lookup. I'm guessing that many of them are Apple devices, as they sometimes don't broadcast device names. If you have a lot of phones, tables, watches and so on; those are the likely culprits. But I wouldn't worry about it.

As for a pop-up connection approval without any WiFi password - that sounds like a serious security risk to me. Without a password, that tells me the WiFi network is unencrypted. That makes it trivial for a nearby hacker to sniff traffic on the network and even spoof a network node. This is not a behavior I'd want on any of my networks regardless of the ISP. It sounds like an idea a marketing person came up with but never ran it past a security engineer.