About Homewire

Who the guides are written for

Most people open their router’s settings only when something needs doing. The Wi-Fi password has leaked, a new console wants a port opened, or the internet is down and someone said to “log in to the router.” That is the reader we picture.

You don’t need to know what a subnet is. Each guide explains a term the first time it matters, and the steps follow the screens you’re likely to meet, including the provider apps that now run settings on many gateways. If you set up networks for a living, the reference tables should still save you a search.

What Homewire covers

Our guides fall into two groups. Together they cover reaching your router’s admin panel and the problems that most often stop people at the login screen.

We would rather keep a small set of guides accurate than publish hundreds of near-identical pages. When a topic needs more depth, it goes into the guide that already covers it instead of a new page with a slightly different title.

What we won’t write

The guides are for equipment you own or have been asked to look after. A few kinds of request come up often in this corner of the web, and we turn them down.

• Getting into someone else’s network. No methods for getting past another person’s router password or joining a neighbor’s Wi-Fi.
• “Master” passwords. Where a factory default exists, we say which models used it and point you to the label on your own router, which takes priority.
• Paid placement. No company pays to be mentioned, recommended or moved up a table.
• Borrowed authority. No made-up testers, lab results, star ratings or reader counts.

Independent of router makers and providers

Homewire isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by or paid by any router manufacturer or internet provider. Names such as NETGEAR, TP-Link or Xfinity appear only so you can tell which equipment a step applies to, and those trademarks belong to their owners.

We don’t use manufacturer logos, and our illustrations show generic equipment rather than a real model. If advertising ever appears on the site, it will be labeled and kept separate from the guides. Our editorial standards set out how that separation works, along with the sources we rely on.

How the guides stay current

Router software changes more often than most people expect, so every guide shows a Reviewed date. It marks the last time an editor checked the page against the manufacturer’s or provider’s own support documentation and corrected anything that had moved.

Provider equipment shows why this matters. Xfinity now asks owners of its XB6 and newer gateways to switch on Admin Tool access in the Xfinity app before the 10.0.0.1 page will accept a login. Plenty of older write-ups never mention that step, and changes like it are exactly what a review looks for.

New to all this? The guide to finding the address your router uses is the best first stop, because every other step depends on it.

Talking to the editors

If you spot something out of date before we do, please tell us. The contact page has our email address and explains what to include, and a note with the page address and your router model is usually enough to start a re-check. We can’t sign in to your router for you, but we can fix a guide that sent you the wrong way.