Windows 10: I'm sick of finding phones or devices on my network. How do we stop it?

I'm sick of finding phones or devices on my windows 10 pc. I have just worked out that the issue has been going on since windows 8 and ost of the answers I've been able to find via crowd support are releavent but not the cure or cause. It should be dealt with by now but lingers as a problem for those who find it. Phone type changes most days but just one at a time. I want andwers as if the device false mobile tower, Raspberry type is around when the broadband goes off and mobile backup comes on then All my activity and entire home pc is at risk rather than just my phone. All answers welome except vague references to the sim card in modem for mobile network as I am aware of it. Just the cure in specipic point form or statements of similar experience are wanted?

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What is this network device?


I woke my desktop PC from sleep this morning, clicked on Network and immediately spotted a Phone in the device list that doesn't belong to anyone here (a Blu brand phone which is unusual enough that I would know about it).

I clicked on the device and was able to view the MAC address, but nothing else useful. A couple minutes later it disappeared from the network list.

Then a few minutes later I went and looked at another PC on the same home network and saw the same phone in its Network list. It also disappeared a couple minutes after I clicked open 'Network'.

Scanned both PCs with various anti-malware programs including Malwarebytes - they look clean.

Any suggestions on what I was seeing, and if it's malicious how to deal with it?


UPDATE: It popped back up again. I checked my router's connection list and don't see it there. For now I blocked the MAC address in my router but would still like to know where this is coming from.

 

What is this network device?


This is a weird problem I've been seeing in windows for years now (not just windows 10). I've been unable to figure out what it is, but we're not alone in this, I did some research a while back and a lot of other people were seeing it as well.

Some suggest it's a bug in the network stack. Some suggest it's neighbors who are connecting somehow, but not able to use the network. Regardless, it's not an uncommon problem and doesn't seem to be anything worry about. Here's some examples:

Solved Strange phones in network - Windows 10 Forums
Strange phones listed on Network heading

 

Mystery Phone Listing on Network


That's actually been happening in Windows for a long time, even back to windows 8 I was seeing it randomly appear (it can be different devices). It seems to be some kind of false positive detection.

Some suggest that this is neighbors connecting to your wifi network. The idea is that the MAC address may be propogated, even though these neighbors are not actually authorized for your network (ie, your router is advertising these mac addresses, but they can't actually use your network, but for some reason they still show up in the list of connected devices).

When you check your WIFI router, the devices won't be listed there, since they haven't been given IP's.. but something in the network architecture still allows MAC advertisement.