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I just purchased the 3 camera system and two solar panels, and installed the first camera a few days ago. My internet speeds are consistently 235 Mbps down / 12 Mbps up, and I have a two node Orbi wifi system that provides ample coverage for my entire property... 2 story 2000 sq ft home, front and back yard. I very rarely have problems with internet or WiFi stability, and it's usually a device side issue.
The first camera I installed is 15-20ft from the base station and covers my front door. Battery charge full, great connectivity reported by the cam. For me, the whole point is being able to see who is coming to my front door, and interact with them as needed. Since installation, the delay between something happening in reality and me seeing it on my app (wifi or mobile data) or web portal, is 3-10 seconds. This is with local streaming enabled; it's worse if I don't have that enabled. It takes 10+ seconds to get the live feed connected. These two things together are non-starters for my desired use case. I suspect this will only get worse if I bring the other two cams online.
I know how to troubleshoot tech -- I build computers and administer all home IT 🙂 I've already tried rebooting everything Arlo, pulling batteries, rebooting Orbi system, turning down the video quality, turning off AI features, etc etc etc. I have logged a support case, and they asked me for a long list of information (serial number of the camera, test delay w/ mobile data and web portal, etc) which I have provided.
I've had several software issues with the app. These aren't deal breakers but I would expect better for a premium priced product. Having worked in high tech for many years, this experience has all the hallmarks of mediocre software development. Their streaming seems inefficient and anything that touches their cloud lags... I also read they are using N-band wifi chip in this base station that I bought in 2020, when AC has been the standard for many years now... and they are trying to push 2k video through it... and I have a feeling based on the boards they are about to tell me my system is the problem which would be a joke.
The odd thing is this doesn't really show up in the tech media reviews. These are recognizable trusted sites... some of them have a brief light mention of "slight" delay "sometimes" but most of them refer to this system as the gold standard in the market. Do I have a defective system? I want to love the system, but my gut is telling me mediocre software development and good marketing...
So here's my question:
Does anybody have a live video feed with almost no delay? I'm talking snappy in the 0-1sec range consistently. I just want to know if I should invest more time into troubleshooting or just return the system now. Maybe my use case isn't a good fit for this product, which is fine by me. I just don't want to waste my time or money on something that won't ever work because of a software or hardware limitation that I can't fix.
We are having the same problem, only with greater delay. Getting to the LIVE part is more than 10 seconds with us. Even on the cameras that are 6 ft from the base station. Broadband and network are fine.
Also problem with video not starting until person is walking away from camera, or clipping it in 10 second clips missing 1- 5 seconds while person is moving. Settings are 100% sensitivity and Record until activity stops.
After $1000 on all the items, I am trying to find a reason not to return it to Costco.
My buddy has a Nest cam that averages .5 sec delay and his internet service is consistently worse than mine (in terms of up/down speed). It's wired for power, but transmitting over wifi. With the the Mbps pipe available to these cams, I think a minimal delay is absolutely possible especially if you turn down the quality so less data needs to be streamed. It just may not be the priority or use case Arlo designed the software for... or perhaps they haven't done a great job of optimization.
@daxon Sounds like a very similar experience. Either we both have defective hardware or this is standard performance... It takes a long time for the live feed to come online for me as well.
Overall I think the "monitoring" is relatively good, but it's unreliable. Sometimes it catches the motion, sometimes it doesn't come on for similar events, sometimes it captures video but not the item that tripped the motion detector.
For the most part it captures motion w/ video passively but the live feed component is not acceptable for me personally. Another tally in the "return" column...
I'm really disappointed with the whole thing. We were unaware that the video doorbell did not link to the Apple homekit as well.
I can see better and faster live feed from the homekit for the other 4 cameras, but if I am away from the house and trying to see an alert... it's useless.
One of the cameras I can stand in front of and it doesn't see me. Last night, nothing at all recorded, even though we saw all the animals walk by on their regular routes. (Raccoon, cat, cat, raccoon).
The doorbell cam took so long to open properly on my iphone11 that I made it to the door before being able to see who was there.
Same here. 10+ seconds for live feed. Takes about one minute to be able to see a clip in my library after I receive a notification. This is with 1 gig internet and cat 6 cabling around the house to the smart station. Not great at all.
We had the Nest doorbell and cameras in our former home and lags/delays were never noticed by anyone.
We ended up sending a router back thinking it was the reason for the same problems stated here. We have gigabit internet with next to no lag. The Arlo 3 cameras and the video doorbell have been a real pain with both delay and botched video (black, distorted, etc). I attribute everything to the base because if a camera is messing up or delayed/not responding, the doorbell does the same.
I am going to put a ticket in for this. It's sad that I have become happy with a stream delay of "anything less than five seconds". Like others, we have missed people at the door because of how terribly slow the system is.
I'll report back with anything new I can get from the support side. Sadly we bought this system during Black Friday, closed on our home in late April, so can't return it for something better.
I feel like you have been watching me over my arlo cameras....but then I remembered - none of them work and if they did, you'd be seeing images from ~ 2 months ago.
I have/had a very similar experience:
I work in IT and have installed networks.
have gigabit at home
have unifi router + AP
have useless arlo camera system
contacted support and was told the equivalent of 'have you tried turning it off and on again'
The best part of the system, with your lag is that the robber/thief can walk up to you and let you know they're going to rob you. You can then open the arlo app and wait the 30 minutes for either the live feed to catch up...or in my case, 30 minutes for the cameras to finally connect.
I give Arlo 2 thumbs up for creating a system that can tell you what happened 30 minutes ago! What a world we live in!
I just purchased an AVD and 4x Ultra 4k cameras with HUB. I run an entire Ubiquity home network from the cable in to the wifi/ethernet out. I have the exact same issue with live video lag. The cameras are currently sitting 1 foot from the HUB and it takes 10-15 seconds to load each camera via the app or my.arlo and another 15 seconds for live video.
I have wireless 4k Amcrests and several 1080 Foscams throughout the property and they are instant access and almost instant live video. I decided to purchase the Arlo equipment for the built in AI alerting, Google Assistant integration, and easy installation. So far I am not impressed. Arlo claims all of these features are a simple setup, but if the primary function of the camera is to provide live video, they are already failing. I can do the same thing Arlo is doing with Google via IFTTT and Smartthings on my other cameras for a fraction of the cost.
Troubleshooting:
This may have changed, but I read that if the cameras are on a separate network than the viewing network, the HUB will route out to the cloud and then back to the viewing device. I purposefully connect all of my surveillance equipment to a segregated network in case a camera becomes compromised. I only view the video feeds through LTE or a separate private network.
I originally thought this was my issue and viewing the video feeds from the private network was causing my delay by forcing all of the streams to go out and then back in. It doesn't appear to be that issue though. Even when I place the HUB on my private network and view the feeds, the lag is still around 15 secs.
I have a Google Pixel 3 with Google Fi as the carrier. One of the features of the carrier is a VPN service when connected to any wifi. I traditionally leave this on for every wifi connection, even my home connection. I found that when this service is on the lag is around 15 secs. When the service is turned off the lag drops to 5 secs. The lag is always 15 secs from my.arlo however.
This is a show stopper for me. Unless Arlo can diagnose this issue and do it rather quickly, I'll probably be returning all 5 devices and finding another solution that does it's primary job every time rather than sometimes and with a delay.
20 + years in I.T ,gigabyte internet, Gigabyte high end router, all hardware is high end, cat 7 cables, wireless network/s integrity monitored closely for optimal output but I get really bad latency issues with Arlo hardware and I find the Arlo 3 cameras have the worst lag, local stream on and off, local stream audio has poor quality and is intermittent like there is a high packet loss problem with pro 3 cameras.
I bet my money on the latency in general being caused by high packet loss....it just has all the red flags for it. Broken sound, image degradation , missing images etc etc, all signs of missing or corrupted data.
I’m pretty sure this is Arlo’s problem, And they don’t seem to want to fix it.
I just bought 4 Pro 3 cameras, a Video Doorbell, and 3 Solar Panels. I'm having nothing but problems. All my problems sound very similar to those on this thread. My doorbell video is distorted and the audio is constantly crackling. All my cameras are within about 30 feet of my base station and have at least 2 bars on the video strength, yet, they take a long time to connect to and often won't connect at all - "The device failed to connect. Please try again." At this point, I'm very frustrated. This really shouldn't be this hard. Has anyone been able to get a solution for this? I may need to call support on this, but I'm afraid that may only frustrate me more since much like others, I am no novice in the IT world.
Like the past response, we did the same thing. Switched to the Nest Doorbell, Nest Cams (Nest Outdoor IQ) and haven't looked back.
After MULTIPLE attempts to get technical support and to be told to switch internet providers (twice), switch routers, unplug modems, etc etc etc (in short, the SAME answer every time) I told them to go to heck and that we would never use an Arlo product again.
And here we are, happy as can be with the Nest suite of products.
I have to give some credit to their tech support? I mean they tried to help?
I informed their person that this is what I do for a living... So suggestions like have you tried rebooting your router and have you tried moving the base station would be met with increasing scorn. Yet, they insisted I had to follow all their steps.
So basically, when they asked me to restart my router (which of course I had already done) I flat out told him that what I'm going to do now is put down the phone and go wash the dishes and then come back to you and tell you that I restarted it.
When they asked me to restart the base station, I told him I was going to take out the garbage..
So basically... I got a lot of chores done. Cameras never worked... But at least my house was clean.
The latency is evident but I think the camera feed you're getting on your phone or workstation is coming from their servers and not directly from the cameras. The camera feed goes straight to them 1st.
I have ring cameras and the delay is not as bad and with gigabit speeds the liveview does show up pretty quick. If I'm on lte connection yeah it might take a bit. I just couldn't do that with this one property so decided on Arlo Pro 3.
As of lately, most of the time the cameras are catching full clips (until there is no motion) but there are times where the clip cuts off when someone is walking mid screen. I noticed another issue is that I think the cameras lock on to one object moving in the camera and ONLY that object until it can't detect motion no more BUT THERE IS STILL MOTION GOING ON and the video still cuts out.
EXAMPLE:
Camera 3 picks up a car going from right to left, mid-way through someone is walking left to right, camera stops recording when the car cannot be detected by motion detection. And I don't get footage of the person walking.
I noticed most of my night shots are cutoff when its a person walking by and I don't know why, maybe its not detecting motion.
Interesting. Is there a way for me to prevent the feeds from going to the Cloud first (or at all for that matter)? If I have a local USB drive connected to the Base Station and stop the Cloud service would that help? That's really what I want to do anyway. I'd really prefer to just store my videos locally as I have plenty of space on my NAS.
So.. I'm new to using security cameras but not technology (software/hardware test engineer)
I just bought (September 28, 2020) the Pro3 with Smart hub with a small external USB 32 SSD drive. The hub then connected to a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 with an upstream of 10Mbps and downstream of 300Mbps (ish).
All Arlo updated: VMB4540r2 1.16.3.2_654, Pro3 1.060.10.18 both H9 for hardware.
Both cameras are currently indoors (for test) and have a 'very strong' connection to the hub that is about 15 feet away and the live view (not even 2K) has a very large lag from about 10-20 seconds.
I haven't even deployed these outside so I can't even speak to how well they work but at this point I'm very concerned that something as basic as a live feed has such a chronic delay.
I chose this system because I can't fully rely on Comcast connectivity as I sometimes get DDoS etc. so something like Nest won't work for me and I like the ability to store video locally which under a simple test it did do.
From this thread it seems this is a problem with the Arlo Pro3 system - I haven't communicated with their support team yet but is the general consensus that the Arlo Pro3 system has some fundamental issues?
This is inaccurate. Even if you are on the same network as your cameras, there is still a 10-20 sec lag. I've tested via a ubiquity pro WAP Serving a 2g ssid and an independent 5g ssid. The 2g network has full access to the 5g network, but replys are filtered via firewall rules. If a camera on the network is compromised on that network there is little they would gain from the primary 5g network. The Arlo cameras are attached to the 2g network and when I view them on the 5g network I have a 15-20 sec lag. When I switch to the 2g network and view the cameras I drop to maybe 10-15 sec lag. This is still beyond acceptable. I have amcrest 4k cameras on the same 2g network and they are 1-2 secs of lag when viewed live. I'm very disappointed in the Arlo product line and if I wasn't out of the return period I would return and purchase nest.
I'm talking more of local network and not wifi 2.4ghz/5ghz ssids. You can't stream 2k if you're not in your local network. It gives you a '2k' icon at the lower left corner of the video if you're streaming 2k or not.
