Base station required?

[fburnham]

Is the base station required or will a pre-exisating wireless network be sufficient to manage the cameras?

[jguerdat]

A base station is always needed. While the cameras use WiFi to communicate, it's only to a dedicated base station. Any other wifi, such as from a router is of no use. The base station must use Ethernet to communicate to the Internet and, hence, withe the Arlo servers.

[R_Lowe]

From my limited technical understanding, I believe it also acts as a dedicated helper for the cameras and your system, relieving your router of any extra bandwith load.  And lastly, it's fairly smallish and unobtrusive (or about the size of a piece of paper only a bit thicker.