How do you hack your router for teleworking traffic?

It’s the question of the era and it’s damnably difficult to answer because there are no good standards for router feature sets or for adapting to company teleworking requirements. Most (including the Uswitch report) make fairly low-key proposals about turning off a few apps, or picking the right time of day. These, however, are faint hope options when some people are stuck on the conference call hamsterhamster wheel all day every day.

Lots of corporate how-to guides focus on features found in only the biggest, smartest and most challenging to configure firewall devices. There is no point talking about QoS service priority allocation if your home router doesn’t even let you edit your internal network IP address range. This didn’t used to be a big deal because the teleworker was pretty much the only network user at home and, therefore, there was no other traffic to manage. The problem in 2020 is that the teleworker might have justified broadband in the house, but now there’s half a dozen other users, all with varying levels of importance, and the home marketplace for routers just hasn’t caught up to that reality.

Perhaps rhaps the least considered options need ed a bit of a revisit. I’m here thinking mostly of the common router feature of allowing more than one SSID, and of hiding some SSIDs and advertising others. When you get a must-meet videoconferencing invitation, it is not good for one’s composure to run round the house, imploring mploring everybody to not just minimise imise but fully and knowingly shut down all their internet-hungry apps (is it just me or do all of the chat and conference apps have quirky, semi hidden “really quit now” menus?

Skype: check. Discord: check. Teams: check.).

The calmer way to do it, I would suggest, is to cut off access to the public, visible SSID as the conference call gets closer. Your laptop, of course, is set up on the hidden SSID. When the call is over, change the password on the visible SSID back as it was before, and all of your users will seamlessly reconnect. It’s not quite the same as a full-fledged access control UI and application framework, but you’re more likely to find this feature across a broad swathe of the router estate out there than you are to be able to use more complex company-centric kit or solutions.