Geofencing too slow to disarm

[jsoctt]

I have recently bought an Arlo pack with 4 wire-free cameras and want to use the geofencing feature.

When I leave the house it arms. However when I return it is not quick enough to detect me in the geofence and does not disarm before all the motion detectors go off when I get home.

I have set it on the largest radius and it makes no difference. It takes at lease a few minutes for me to drive down the street, get out of the car and enter the house. Then I get pinged over and over by the movement detections before it disarms.

Is there a way to fix this otherwise geofencing is completely useless..?

[TomMac]

In another thread, someone mention using the actual address of the home... Never tried as it worked fine for me when used

Also make sure it's real gps and not working off cell tower sites

[jsoctt]

Thanks Tom... This might be a stupid question - but how do you know its using "real gps" and not cell towers? Is this some setting in the Arlo app (can't find it)?

I'll give the fixed street address a go when I'm home tonight. Thx.

[steve_t]

I use geofencing for other home automation and security. What I found was, after changing my wifi router to a Netgear Orbi system, is that each time my phone connects to the wifi, it does a location update. This location update finds the phone at home and the system is disarmed. Before I had Orbi, my phone wouldn't realise I was home and the security would get triggered. Now my phone connects every time before I walk in the house and it's always disarmed. To test it out, you could move your router closer to your entry point or use a stronger router or range extender or do what I did and get a mesh router

[jsoctt]

So you are saying that when the phone connects to the home wifi it triggers a location update... That kind of defeats the purpose of geofencing though. My home wifi router is at the other end of the house. But the Arlo wifi-thing is near the entry but my phone never connects to that.

[TomMac]

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jsoctt wrote:

Thanks Tom... This might be a stupid question - but how do you know its using "real gps" and not cell towers? Is this some setting in the Arlo app (can't find it)?

I'll give the fixed street address a go when I'm home tonight. Thx.

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You've have to check your phone... and the specs of same ..is it GPS, or AGPS  ( a combo of cell towers and gps to aprox location ) also known as Assisted GPS

[steve_t]

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jsoctt wrote:

So you are saying that when the phone connects to the home wifi it triggers a location update... That kind of defeats the purpose of geofencing though. My home wifi router is at the other end of the house. But the Arlo wifi-thing is near the entry but my phone never connects to that.

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How so? Geofencing is having an action based on your phone entering or leaving a prescribed area. Phones only check their location every once in a while or if you unlock it or if it connects to wifi. As you've experienced, this is unreliable unless you have something trigger a location update at exactly the time you want.
The Arlo base station location is inconsequential to the geolocation function. You just need it to be as central to the cameras as possible. Given the base station is ethernet only and your wifi router is at the other end of the house, are you running off a range extender or something?

[jsoctt]

No range extender. If I drive into the garage, get out of the car and open the door it pretty much can connnet to the wifi from there (my iphone that is).

This issue is that Arlo allows you to use location based on a circle of radius up to several hundred metres to disarm your system. If the phone is not going to poll its location till you are (likely) actually in the home - then location awareness for arlo is useless because you will tigger the arlo alarm before the app on the phone can work out that you are home...

They should state that you are likely going to have to be near your wifi router before it updates the state of your system.

Maybe its only good for pedestrians. If you are driving home the location updates are too slow...

[steve_t]

This is probably one of the reasons why Geofencing is still in Beta.
To fix it, they could probably get your phone to update its location every 10 seconds but you'd smash through your battery in no time.
The radius merely allows you to select how far away from home it CAN trigger but this has no bearing on how often your phone updates its location. This is a phone function, not an Arlo app function.
How is your base station at the front of your house while the wifi router is down the back?

[jsoctt]

Thanks @steve_t and @TomMac for your responses. I'm understanding how it works now but alas - its no good for me. Maybe if they could give you a setting in the app to set the amount of time between polls for location or something like that - let me the decide whats better - more accurate geofencing or battery life.   😉

@steve_t to answer your question -> at the front of the house is our study where the cable internet comes into the house. In there I have the cable model and then a netgear router. From the router it goes into a 10 port switch which sends cables all over the house to every room. Then up the other end of the house one of those cables plugs into an apple wifi base station. Back in the study the netger arlo base station plugs directly into my switch - it doesn't need to be anywhere near the wifi router. The wifi floods the whole house anyway...

[steve_t]

Yup. Being able to choose polling frequency would be a great option.
I've just had a very similar discussion on facebook with the smartthings crowd and there are a number of people who do exactly what I do with regards to getting their phone to connect to their home wifi in the street or driveway rather than it not connecting til they're in the house

[jguerdat]

I have an August Smart Lock which uses geofencing.  Not only does it use location services but it also waits until I connect via WiFi before attempting to connect to the lock via Bluetooth.  Not that this relates specifically to Arlo and its implementation of GF...

[steve_t]

Another thing that came up in the smartthings discussion was that for Android phones, we have an App Manager that 'optimises' apps ie turns them off if you haven't used them for 3 days. If you run Android, you should disable the 'optimisation' of any home automation apps including the Arlo app

[jguerdat]

"It depends." (TM)

My August app has specifically added a section to the config that will ignore my setting on this.  I had bitched about slow response that was perhaps related to Doze mode and this was their response.  It seems to be working much better even with optimization on.

Whether the same is true for Arlo is another issue.