Arlo Q Plus = terrible lag on ethernet :(

[Muddypaw]

Hi everyone,

I was so excited to finally take possession of my first home security camera today. I did research and liked most of the reviews of the Arlo Q+ compared to the many cheaper options around.

So it arrived today, and after some issues getting it to register my email in their system it finally started working tonight.

It's connected by Ethernet cable (non-POE).

I have what's considered fairly high-speed NBN in Australia, and have no issues live streaming HD video on several TV's at once and some serious download speeds 🙂

Anyway, I just noticed that this camera suffers badly from Lag. It's in live mode, motion detection off. And yet when I wave my arm in front of the camera, it takes about 5-6 seconds to show it on the video 😞

I have only tried viewing it on my PC, which is also on Ethernet.

I bought this to monitor my home while I am at work and to monitor my pets in real-time.

I think there must be a setting or something to fix this, surely? 

I would not be very happy if this is the best it gets, considering the price of this camera.

Any advice much appreciated 🙂

Cheers

Muddypaw (Australia)

[michaelkenward]

Just a note to reassure you that what you see is not typical.

On Ethernet my Arlo Q Plus is effectively "live video".

What else is on your network?

[jguerdat]

There will always be lag but shouldn't be that bad. The issue is that you're seeing video from the server, not directly from the camera. Upload speed and overall delays between your camera and the server.  One way to get an idea is to use traceroute (tracert.exe in Windows) to arlo.netgear.com and look for triple digit delays in various hops. Ignore any no response times - just focus on the responses with delays.  Here's my current attempt - trying to read the DNS names suggest that I go from Rochester, NY to Chicago, IL to NY city to London to the Amazon AWS server in Ireland.  My delays jump to 3 digits once the path starts going trans-Atalantic.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>tracert arlo.netgear.com

Tracing route to ArloProdLB-1815857678.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com [52.30.161.142]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.10.1
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms 142.254.218.125
3 17 ms 20 ms 31 ms agg63.hnrtnyaf02h.northeast.rr.com [24.58.232.213]
4 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms agg46.rochnyei02r.northeast.rr.com [24.58.49.64]
5 17 ms 15 ms 14 ms be28.rochnyei01r.northeast.rr.com [24.58.32.74]
6 30 ms 37 ms 29 ms bu-ether15.chcgildt87w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.72]
7 25 ms 23 ms 25 ms unk-426d05e1.adelphiacom.net [66.109.5.225]
8 27 ms 25 ms 24 ms chi-b21-link.telia.net [62.115.156.204]
9 104 ms 104 ms 105 ms nyk-bb4-link.telia.net [62.115.137.58]
10 111 ms 115 ms 106 ms ldn-bb4-link.telia.net [62.115.136.184]
11 104 ms 138 ms 106 ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [62.115.136.193]
12 104 ms 103 ms 104 ms ldn-b7-link.telia.net [62.115.138.155]
13 104 ms 104 ms 103 ms a100row-ic-304712-ldn-b3.c.telia.net [213.248.99.214]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 115 ms 115 ms 124 ms 54.239.42.113
17 127 ms 140 ms 151 ms 52.93.6.162
18 115 ms 116 ms 113 ms 52.93.101.9
19 148 ms 127 ms 128 ms 52.93.101.32
20 115 ms 114 ms 113 ms 52.93.7.153
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.

[Muddypaw]

Hi. The camera is now the only thing on ethernet. I moved everything else to wifi. Still the same lag 😞

Many issues with this cam, not just lag.

I'm wondering if I can simply hook this cam to my pc and record continuosly that way?

Probably not i think 😞

[Muddypaw]

So how do i fix the unacceptable delay from the server? It's useless for live real-time vid.

[jguerdat]

You can't view live except through the servers and the lag due to the connection to the servers (and back) isn't anything you can control. One thing you may want to consider is upload speeds and the amount of upload traffic caused by other devices. When I had low upload speeds I used QoS (Quality of Service) settings to reserve 200-300Kbps of upload speed so one device couldn't saturate the connection.  Again, testing your upload speed using speedtest.net would be useful for some real information.