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Skydog is an innovative networking solution that gives consumers the ability to track and manage internet use across an entire household. It pairs a wireless router with a computer or mobile app, showing you first how you use the Internet, then giving you control over how you want to use the Internet. Knowledge is power, and in this case, Skydog hands consumers the power to budget their bandwidth down to the very last bit.
Understanding that the average household today can have multiple connected devices per person, Skydog assigns each device to an individual user on your network, and each user can have multiple devices. Data from each user, such as web access history for the past two weeks, is aggregated and graphed.
Consumers can set different rules for each user that change based on the time of day or day of the week. These rules cover which types of websites (or specific websites) a user can visit or how long they can spend doing things like watching movies or playing games.
Skydog also allows the creation of up to three separate internet zones with select amounts of bandwidth allocated to each zone. If, for example, you work from home and want to ensure your VoIP conference call doesn’t drop out due to your roommate's HD movie streaming habit, you can create a dedicated zone with enough bandwidth to host your call.
Skydog is an interesting tool for anyone who wants to see where and how they spend their connected time. Skydog is especially compelling for parents looking for an unobtrusive way to manage their children’s ever-growing exposure and use of the internet. Unfortunately, Skydog doesn't currently have a way to distinguish between different user profiles on the same device, so if all your household devices are shared, Skydog is not the management product for you.
In December, Skydog announced a partnership with Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping kids grow up in a world of technology. Common Sense Media aims to further inform Skydog's already robust content filtering system.
Skydog has been on the market since October 2013 at a price point of $149.