How do I see everything that is connected to my wifi?

People come to this list for one of two reasons: they suspect a neighbour is using their connection, or they are trying to work out what is eating the broadband. The list answers the first question well and the second badly, because most routers show what is connected rather than what is consuming. It is still worth knowing where it is, and an annotated device list is genuinely useful the next time something goes wrong.

Step by step

1. Open the router's app or settings page.Provider-supplied routers increasingly do this best in their phone app. Otherwise log into the settings page in a browser and look for attached devices, connected devices, device list, LAN clients or DHCP clients.
2. Read what each column means.You will see a name, an address on your network, and a hardware address — a string of six pairs of characters separated by colons. The name is whatever the device chose to call itself and is often blank or generic. The hardware address is fixed to that piece of hardware and is the reliable identifier.
3. Count your own devices first.Write out every phone, tablet, laptop, TV, streaming stick, console, speaker, watch, printer, camera, doorbell, plug, bulb and thermostat in the house. Most households undercount by a factor of two, and a list that seems alarming usually stops seeming so at this point.
4. Identify the unnamed entries by elimination.Turn one suspect device off, or put it into aeroplane mode, refresh the list and see which entry drops away. Tedious but conclusive. Do the ones you cannot place, not all of them.
5. Rename what you identify.Most routers let you set a friendly name against a device. Half an hour spent doing this once turns the list from noise into something useful, and makes a genuinely unknown device obvious the next time.
6. Treat a truly unknown device seriously but calmly.If something remains after everything of yours is accounted for, change the wifi password. That immediately removes every device that is not re-entered, including any you did not want. Then rejoin your own devices.
7. Check the guest network list separately.Devices on a guest network often appear in a separate list, or not at all in the main one. If you have visitors or smart devices on a guest network, look there too before concluding anything.

Tips

• Modern phones use a randomised hardware address per network by default, so the same phone can appear as a different unrecognisable device after a rejoin. This is the single most common cause of a mystery entry.
• The device list usually keeps recently seen devices for a while after they disconnect. An entry does not necessarily mean something is connected right now.
• If you want to know what is using the bandwidth rather than what is connected, look for a traffic or usage section — not all routers have one, and the ones that do vary enormously in usefulness.

Common mistakes

• Blocking an unrecognised device by its hardware address — Address filtering is easily defeated and creates a long-term maintenance job. Changing the wifi password to a strong one achieves more, immediately, and needs doing only once.
• Assuming an odd name means an intruder — Manufacturer default names are frequently meaningless strings, and address randomisation makes your own phone look foreign. Identify by elimination before acting.

Questions people ask