Buying, downloading, and installing AVG Family Safety was as easy as you would expect from an online site such as AVG. A restart of the computer was required, which is always annoying, but I'm sure is necessary for the services to be started properly etc. The parental controls worked very similarly to Net Nanny and K9 Web Protection with typical options for blocking entire categories of web content such as pornography, social networking, online videos, and so forth.
After setting up the parental controls I attempted to set up the Whole Home Filtering. This is where I ran into some snags. The feature requires you to enter the router's username and password. This is the username and password one needs to access the router settings and not the wireless SSID and password. After entering the settings and clicking "Save" it appeared that it worked, but I didn't receive any kind of message indicating whether the Whole Home Filtering was set up successfully or not. When I tried to go to pornography sites on a separate computer I had no difficulty, so I assumed the Whole Home Filtering was not set up successfully. The manual way of implementing Whole Home Filtering is the same as setting up OpenDNS. You simply have to access your router (often at 192.168.0.1) from a web browser and find the DNS settings. I switched the DNS settings from dynamic to static and entered the two server addresses that are provided by AVG Family Safety and clicked Apply. At this point the router restarted and the network was down for a few minutes.
The network restarted but I was still able to visit blocked sites on a separate computer. The client, however, was noticing that sites were being blocked on the iPad and TV. I won't go into the frustration that followed, but it took me longer than I'd like to admit before I figured out that the Whole Home Filtering was indeed working. It was blocking all of the devices, such as the TV, Xbox 360, and smart phone but was not blocking the computers (except for the computer on which the program was installed). This seems to be by design. AVG wants you to install the program on computers, up to three per subscription, but use the Whole Home Filtering option to control non-computer devices.
This leaves me with a few questions. The information on the Bsecure website does not indicate that the Whole Home Filtering feature functions with this kind of a split. What happens when other people come over with a laptop and have free-reign on the network? My client was satisfied as his son doesn't use a computer at home but instead uses (and abuses) non-computer devices. Also when his son does obtain a computer they can install the program directly on his computer. Another question I have is how does the DNS servers distinguish between computers and non-PC devices such as an iPad? If all DNS look-ups are being routed through the AVG DNS servers, then shouldn't all computers and devices be affected equally? What am I missing here? Is this program functioning as intended or does something else need to be set up? Any comments would be most appreciated.