Best Battery Life

[Ggilmore_55]

My ISP came over yesterday to resolve my internet issues, my internet keeps dropping off, disconnecting. They swapped out my modem and suggested I change my camera resolution, saying that security cameras use a lot of bandwidth. I chose "Best Battery Life" within the settings menu and still my internet drops off, disconnects. Any suggestions, please?

[StephenB]

What is your internet uplink speed?  Have you tested it with speedtest.net?

[Ggilmore_55]

My ISP plan is 80 mpbs. I ran speedtest.net and results were 80 .21 Download and 12.15 Upload speeds with the camera on. Should I unplug the camera and run speedtest again to compare the results? Without unplugging the camera, can I just put the camera in disarmed mode or  go into settings/mydevices/ and choose the camera and toggle Device On to Device off and run the speedtest to get accurate results?

[jguerdat]

You have plenty of speed for your cameras. Cameras that stream all the tiome, especially at higher resolutions, will eat bandwidth but you don't seem to have that problem. Are the cameras plugged into AC power? If so, they will stream all the time but not if on battery power.

TO eat up 12Mbps, you'd have to have 8-10 cameras streaming all the time.

[StephenB]

Try disconnecting the base station's ethernet connection for a day or so, and see if the internet dropouts continue.  It's quite possible (even likely) that the tech is blaming the cameras because they can't figure out what is really wrong.

Another thought is that you can monitor your internet connectivity (not the bandwidth), and get a graph of the outages.  PingPlotter (https://www.pingplotter.com/#) is a good tool for this.  The paid version is quite expensive, but you can probably get the info you need during the free trial period, and then uninstall it.  The idea here is to get a graph when the base station isn't connected (for a couple of days), and then compare that to a graph when the base station is connected.

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@jguerdat wrote:

TO eat up 12Mbps, you'd have to have 8-10 cameras streaming all the time.

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@Ggilmore_55 - as @jguerdat says, the relevant speed is the uplink (which is 12 Mbps in your case).

Arlo says 4 Mbps for the ultra (when in 4K mode), and 1 Mbps for the others.  I think these are a bit conservative.  If you have Arlo Pros you shouldn't be using anywhere close to 12 Mbps.

However, if you read your ISP service agreement, you'll find that it doesn't guarantee 12 Mbps.  The bandwidth you get does depend on what your neighbors are doing.  Usually downlink bandwidth use is higher than uplink, but if someone in your home (or one of your neighbors) uses torrents then that could be crushing the uplink capacity.  Cloud backup also can use a lot of uplink bandwidth.

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@jguerdat wrote:

Are the cameras plugged into AC power? If so, they will stream all the time...

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Not really true.  When AC powered, the newer cameras are always looking at the video (improving motion detection).  But they aren't always streaming to the cloud (unless you've purchased the CVR plan for them).  They are only sending streams when they detect motion - which they also do when running on battery.

But they often do stream more when they are on AC power - just not all the time.  That's because they will detect motion that is missed when just using the batteries.

[TomMac]

I would also check your signal input to the modem.... usu  http://192.168.100.1

your modem incomming downstream signal should be < 14dBmv for all channels

If it come in to hot, the modem can drop out

[jguerdat]

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@StephenB wrote:

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@jguerdat wrote:

Are the cameras plugged into AC power? If so, they will stream all the time...

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Not really true.  When AC powered, the newer cameras are always looking at the video (improving motion detection).  But they aren't always streaming to the cloud (unless you've purchased the CVR plan for them).  They are only sending streams when they detect motion - which they also do when running on battery.

But they often do stream more when they are on AC power - just not all the time.  That's because they will detect motion that is missed when just using the batteries.

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AFAIK, they must stream all the time so you get the 3 second lookback. There's no (known) buffering so the only way to get it is to stream and chop out the motion detection part with the previous 3 seonds attached.

[StephenB]

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@jguerdat wrote:

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AFAIK, they must stream all the time so you get the 3 second lookback. There's no (known) buffering so the only way to get it is to stream and chop out the motion detection part with the previous 3 seonds attached.

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3 seconds isn't a lot of buffering at 1 mbps - ~400KB.  It's not crazy to think that it's in the camera.  

They might stream it to the base station, but surely not to the cloud.