Why Your TV Should Have Its Own Wi-Fi at Home
Without jargon where possible. And where it isn't, I'll explain it with an apartment building.
The box that kept stuttering
I was handed a cheap Chinese TV box to take a look at. The problem was an ordinary one: it stuttered. I expected full storage or weak hardware, and both turned out to be true. But when I looked at what was actually running on it, I found something worse.
The system came from the factory with programs holding permissions a normal app never gets. One could "tap" and type into any other app on its own, as if someone were holding the remote. Another could install and remove apps by itself and wipe their data. On top of that, factory test tools had been left in, tools that have no business in a finished product. The security updates were several years old.
This isn't an exception. Security firms and Google have repeatedly warned about whole waves of cheap Android boxes that ship with a backdoor right in the factory firmware and are sold under dozens of different brand names. They look normal, they work normally, and they report nothing.
And here's the important part: a box like that usually sits on the same Wi-Fi network as your laptop, the phone with your banking app, and your kids' tablet.
One network for everything
Most households have a single Wi-Fi network. Everything joins it: the TV, the smart plug, the robot vacuum, the camera, the printer, the phones, the computers and the kids' tablets. For convenience it's great, everything just finds everything else.
But "everything finds everything" works both ways. Devices on one network can see each other. When one of them is bad, whether badly written, never updated, or outright backdoored like that box, it has an open road to everything else. It can try passwords, watch what's going on, or look for a weak spot on the computer that holds your photos and documents.
With kids it's even more sensitive. Few people secure a child's tablet or computer as well as their own, and kids install "free" games that are anything but sparing with ads and tracking.
The network as an apartment building
It's easiest to explain with an apartment building.
A single home network is one big flat with no doors. Everyone lives together, and everyone can see into every room, including the bedroom and the drawers.
A split network is an apartment building. There's a shared front entrance, the internet connection, but every flat has its own door:
- Your flat: your computers and phones. From here you can go anywhere, including "visiting" the other flats, say to play a film on the TV.
- The family flat: the rest of the family's and the kids' devices. They have their own network and can reach wherever they need to from it.
- The flat for TVs and cameras: they can reach the internet and the home media server, but they can't see into your flats.
- The flat for "smart" things: plugs, bulbs, sensors. They may go out to the internet and nowhere else.
- The guest room: visitors get Wi-Fi but see nothing of the household.
In a building like that, the Chinese box would live in the TV flat. It could do whatever it likes there, but it would never reach your computer's door.
How it can be done
Here's the good news: you don't need to be a network engineer, and you don't need to do it all at once.
Simplest, 5 minutes: almost every router has a guest Wi-Fi. Turn it on and connect the TV, the TV box, the plugs and other smart devices to it. Keep your phones and computers on the main network. The guest network is usually already separated from the main one on its own. That alone removes most of the risk.
Better: better routers can create several separate networks with their own rules about who may go where. The technical term you'll most often hear is VLAN, a virtual network: one physical router and one set of cables, but several networks that know nothing about each other until you allow it.
When the router can't do VLANs: not every home router supports them, or supports them reliably. It can be done another way, for example with separate Wi-Fi networks and rules between them. For a regular person the result is the same: the TV can't see the computer. What matters is the idea, not the specific technology.
What it costs
Honestly, it isn't free.
Once you split the devices up, they stop finding each other on their own, and you notice it right away. The phone suddenly can't find the printer, music from the phone won't play on the speaker, and the TV can't see the computer you used to play films from. Each device now lives in a different "flat". It can be sorted out, but it takes a bit of patience and a few extra rules.
That's exactly why most people stay with one network: it's more convenient. But that convenience is precisely what those cheap devices rely on.
Closing
You don't have to rebuild the whole house. If you take only one thing from this article, let it be this: the TV, the TV box and every "smart" thing belong on the guest Wi-Fi, not on the one with your computer, your banking phone and your kids' tablet.
It's five minutes in the router settings and one of the cheapest insurance policies you can set up at home.