Arlo stopped recording 10 days ago with no notice or warning...so what good is it?

[ChicagoArlo]

I posted here a couple of weeks ago about my issues getting my two cameras and base station to work when I added a wifi range extender to my home's wifi network.   I finally got that figured out with the help of a guru here.   It seemed to be working great, better than ever as now our back camera was in range.  I checked on it a few times over the next few days to make sure the connection stayed solid, and it was.  As I said, better than ever, since the back camera had suffered from range issues and that was now fixed.

But apparently not!

Today my daughter told me that a package for us was delivered a few days ago at 2pm.  I got no such package.   However I said at least I can look back at the recordings and see if it was in fact delivered, and maybe get a look at who took it if that's what happened.

But...there are no recordings since Nov 30, ten days ago.   'Your Arlo device appears to be offline.'   And no recordings for the last ten days!

I know the base station has been blue every day since it's right there by the door.

Shouldn't the system have sent some kind of message to say 'NOT WORKING' or are you supposed to babysit it and check every few minutes to make sure it's recording?

I don't even know what to do now, whether to even bother to get it online again, because if I do it will apparently just decided to stop on its own.

If anyone has some advice I'll welcome it but right now I'm pretty disgusted with the whole thing.   If it can randomly stop working like this with no notification, it's essentially worthless.

[Retired_Member]

This.

There are a least two Arlo camera models which will go offline seemingly at random and stay offline until they are reset, and the Arlo system will neither notify the user that a problem has occurred nor provide a system event log facility, a record, of when past problems have occurred.  Basically there is no way to tell if the system is working or not without checking it regularly, which is what I do, daily.

Interesting fact - on average, around 1000 YouTube searches per month use the exact phrase 'Arlo camera offline'.  260 Google searches per month, on average, use the exact phrase 'Arlo camera keeps going offline'.  The average number of people who search 'Arlo camera setup' per month? 1600.  The support tickets are open and, supposedly, in progress.  Maybe things will improve soon.  Who knows.

[ShayneS]

Hi @ChicagoArlo

Are you still experiencing this issue with one of the cameras appearing offline? 

[ChicagoArlo]

I fixed the problem, and it may not have been caused by the Arlo system malfunctioning.   I'm not 100% sure of that.   And I do think that when your system goes offline you should get some kind of notification.  That's what upset me the most.

As it turned out, there were recordings for the time my system was offline, on the micro SD card in the base station.   So I was able to see what happened with the 'missing' package, and that turned out okay, it had been delivered safely but stashed away.

I was suspicious of the system going offline on Dec 1, and suspected that Arlo had messed up the billing, causing my account to be closed.   However that appears to have been wrong, as a CC charge went through on Dec 2.

What seems to have happened is that the Arlo base station lost contact with the wifi network.  OR the wifi extender lost contact with the master router.   I don't get how  this happened; the base station is hard-wired to the extender, and the extender showed no sign of an issue.   All the extender's lights were green and the base station's light was blue when I found the problem so everything should have been okay.   

What I did was power-cycle the extender and base station, and after that the Arlo system came back online.  It's been fine since.

This still seems like something that could happen again without me knowing it.  Shouldn't the system send you an alert when there's a problem?

[Retired_Member]

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@ChicagoArlo wrote:

This still seems like something that could happen again without me knowing it.  Shouldn't the system send you an alert when there's a problem?

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When I bought my system this is one of the functions I assumed the SmartHub would provide me with.  I didn't look it up, I just assumed that I'd be able to verify that something sold as a 'security system' would have some testing and monitoring functions.  This is tricky to do with a WiFi camera as there are a lot of factors that can knock a WiFi device connected to a cloud service 'offline', but it's pretty easy to do if the access point, connected to an Ethernet cable, is part of the product package.  A system event log, 'camera offline' notifications, a WiFi diagnostic utility that can detect and report on WiFi interference problems and recommend solutions.  The capability to detect changes in the WiFi environment and adapt quickly if a neighboring access point switches channel.  The stuff that would make 'security system' a fair claim to make.  Notifying the user when it's not working is the bare minimum, and it doesn't even do that.

[StephenB]

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@Retired_Member wrote:
A system event log, 'camera offline' notifications, a WiFi diagnostic utility that can detect and report on WiFi interference problems and recommend solutions.  The capability to detect changes in the WiFi environment and adapt quickly if a neighboring access point switches channel.  

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Agreed.  I'd like to see the event log contain info on when the base loses/regains contact with the Arlo cloud, and when the base is booted or restarted.  And a log (cloud based) showing logins - including IP addresses.  Graphs showing the amount of camera activity and amount of charge would be useful in troubleshooting battery drain issues.

Definitely a lot of room for improvement in this area.