At the end of my rope with these cameras

Cameras
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81

Well around me many of the ones I’ve encountered either have that corrugated steel vertical siding or aluminum siding, but obviously it is not a rule, it was just a guess based on the issues they were seeing. Typically the windows are small and there aren’t as many as a house, and most wifi needs to use the windows regardless, as even with vinyl siding there may be a foil vapor barrier underneath.

You can’t increase your wifi speed by upgrading your internet plan. The wifi speed is controlled by the router/access point and on 2.4ghz N wifi (which these cams use) we’ve pretty much hit the limit. The only way to increase throughput is to try and increase your signal strength and reduce interference and contention with neighbors/other 2.4ghz technologies (like bluetooth).

The cams only need about 1mbit/sec each, both on wifi and on the internet plan. The internet plan really only comes into play when you’re viewing them remotely, when on the same network the internet just passes a small amount of authentication data.

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If you’re looking for a 20x optical zoom and have a $500 budget, don’t even be looking at wifi cloud cams. They’re not going to do what you want them to. The lens for 20x is going to be big and you’re going to need a rather large enclosure, similar to something you’d see on a commercial building.

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increasing your internet plan increases your base speeds at which you can download and upload. But if you upgrade your plan and get a wifi 6 or better router/gateway that will definitely improve your wifi speeds. I used to have only 650 mbs and wifi 5, once I upgraded to 1gb speeds it improved my connectivity to the multitude of devices I have connected to wifi and my cameras stopped loosing connectivity, but I still had issues with slow response times when connecting to the cameras when I was not home (like at work). I then upgraded to wifi 6 and speeds up to 1.3 gbps and the difference was amazing in how fast it connects and allows me to control my cameras. I don’t even think these cameras are wifi 6 capable and if so the overall speed increase is what affected the connectivity to the cameras the most.

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Unfortunately that is not true. These cameras use 802.11n (Wifi 4) 2.4ghz wifi. Same technology that is in 15 year old routers. A couple of them now use 802.11ax (Wifi 6) 2.4ghz wifi but the improvements are very minimal. Fact of the matter is, the 2.4ghz wifi spectrum is very congested and is prone to interference from tons of things around the home, and they’ve pretty much already implemented all the “coexistence” technology that they can.

And again, when you’re on the same network as the cams, they hardly need any internet speed at all, the video streams directly from the camera to your viewing device, not via the internet.

Your internet speed increase was not what changed your experience with the cams, even the “upgrade” of wifi technology wasn’t. More likely the old router just had lousy wifi and the newer one improved on it a bit. That being said, while ISP routers have gotten better, their wifi signal is still generally lousy and 3rd party routers nearly always outperform them.

When you’re away from home, faster internet could improve your experience, but really only if you had really really slow internet before, since streaming one of these cams only requires about 1mbit/sec upload speed. Even if you’re watching 10 simultaneously, the vast majority of even cable internet (which has lousy upload speeds) has at least 10M upload.

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You know it’s kind of funny that the actual support from Wyze where the ones who recommended upgrading my internet speeds to a higher tier to improve connectivity and, like I said before, it worked. Then when I did upgrade to a wifi 6 router the connectivity to my cameras got even better. Yes you can probably attest the better connectivity to a better gateway/router the second time but it was still the same hardware when I first increased my speed tier and got better connectivity. In fact many years ago when I first started getting into smart home devices I would constantly loose connectivity from my Alexa devices and random smart lights here and there, I think it was around 250mbps for the tier I had. I upgraded my tier as recommended by my ISP and guess what, it improved the connectivity to all my devices. In fact I remember this table that showed the number of smart home devices each tier could handle and as far as I’ve encountered that seems to be true.

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Unfortunately offshore 3rd party support is not very knowledgeable. They just want to get rid of you so they meet their quota for number of calls served during their shift.

If you were hitting a speed limit, it would have been with the upload speed, maybe that tier only had 5 or 10 megs upload and you were using too much (those upload speeds were common years ago). Most ISPs, even cable ones, are doing 10 to 20 upload on even their low tiers, but to get 50+ they want you to subscribe to gig. I have 300/300 fiber and rarely hit even 10% of that. 10 megs upload is plenty to support a decent number of IOT devices, as long as you aren’t viewing multiple video streams remotely at the same time.

Yeah ISPs love to BS you with those stats. If you believe them, my mother needs 2 gig internet for her web browsing/email. But because she has like 15 wifi devices (none of which use much bandwidth at all) she’s a heavy user according to them.

Long story short, upgrading your internet speed has 0 impact on your LAN wifi, and when viewing the camera stream locally, that’s the only thing that comes into play. Replacing the router can improve it but if you’re going to do that, I’d recommend using an aftermarket one which nearly always will outperform ISP rented gateways. Even for remote viewing, there aren’t many ISPs still doing those exceptionally low upload speeds like 5 megs, even 10 is pretty rare now.

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It wasn’t offshore as the issue was escalated and I got actual Wyze support. They had me install a wifi detector software with a code to check my signal strength and it was more than strong enough. That’s when they recommended a higher tier.

That’s about right, I think the fastest upload speed I had back then was maybe 15mbps.

But the thing is so far that has turned out to be true. The higher tier I go on my plan the better connectivity I get for multiple devices. I once thought it was bull also but another internet user in a Geek forum explained it to me why the lower tiers can’t handle that many smart devices connected all at once. One thing I believe you are forgetting is that with the higher tiers you not only get better speeds but also greater bandwidth. Which is what probably plays a major roll in better connectivity to all my smart home devices.

I stick with the ISP gateways because they’ve literally never failed me and the one time I did try an aftermarket one it had issues right from the start because it constantly need updates and those updates always seemed to interfere with my internet when they were happening. Whereas the ISP gateways area always updated and never interfere with whatever I am doing online.

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If they had you test your upload speed and saw it wasn’t sufficient for your usage scenario, then it was a good recommendation. If they didn’t, it was a lucky guess.

Because you’ve probably gotten a new router with each major upgrade. Or it could just be that your upload wasn’t keeping up with the number of devices you have. But in reality, they are advertising/selling you on the download speeds, they don’t want to attract attention to the fact that they’re giving lousy upload speeds. But even FIOS, which is symmetrical, pulls that crap about telling you that you need way more than you actually do.

Unless their explanation was that your upload speed wasn’t sufficient for what you were doing, there is no other reason that would be the case.

In this context, speed and bandwidth are the exact same thing. Two different words with identical meaning. “Throughput” is another identical meaning word.

That would explain why you’ve seen significant improvements when you upgrade, as typically they’ll give you an updated/better gateway with the new tier. While their gateways have improved over time, they’re still a fraction of the performance and coverage of even an inexpensive TP Link router. Understood that some prefer to use ISP gateways, and if they work for you (and are worth the rental cost), you can always get it replaced if it dies, always get updated when new standards come out, etc. But in the long run, even if you buy a new aftermarket router every few years, it still works out cheaper and usually works better. I don’t recommend letting a router auto update its firmware, usually good to wait a week or two then do it manually at a time when it won’t interrupt things. The ISPs do them in the early morning hours and some routers also let you schedule the updates. But of course, like renting an apartment or leasing a car, some prefer that model over buying, and I’m not saying nobody should use an ISP gateway.

All that being said, plenty have had issues with the ISP gateways too, frequently threads here (and plenty of other places) about the ISP router blocking things it shouldn’t be, not being able to adjust even basic wifi settings, overheating and freezing up, etc.

Networking is my profession for over 25 years now, the reason I try to dispel these myths about speed is I hate seeing people get taken advantage of by the ISPs. Fact of the matter is, the majority of households would be fine with 50 or 100 megs, and even 5 or 10 meg upload can handle quite a bit. Those with lots of IOT devices or people in the household might need a step up to a middle tier. There are very few people that need or are able to take advantage of the 1+ gig that they all try to sell you. And of course the reason they try to sell it to you is they know that, you’re not going to use it, but they get extra money which is basically pure profit.

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That’s the thing, I only got the upgraded gateway the last time when I upped my speeds to 1300mbps. I did not get a new gateway when I upped my speeds to 1000mbps, but I still saw an improvement in connectivity to my cameras not to mention that it stopped loosing connecting on 2 of my smart lights.

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In that case the only other explanation is that you got a step up in upload speed with the gig upgrade (usually they bump you from like 10 or 20 to 50 when you go to gig). Normally 10 or 20 is plenty but if you have a lot of stuff sending data outbound it can interfere.

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hey all, just a quick update on my particular issue.
as i mentioned previously, i ran a janky extender outside with an extension cord to give it a try. this seemed to work fairly well for my purposes - i imagine a part of the interference has been my metal roof. as mentioned earlier in the thread, even though the walls are rather thin, wifi is kind of a fickle thing and can be easily impeded. i have found, however, that even with a rather poor connection, the extender i have mounted under the roof of the porch has helped a pretty good deal.

today, i finally ran the cable necessary to improve the connection of the exterior extender, which is just 100 or so feet of cat5 routed through the floor and to the porch. for the period of time i was able to test this, it seemed to improve stability further. i am, unfortunately, still a victim of assumption - my TPLink router has just enough ethernet ports available for my current load of devices. it was either have the extender up to snuff, or quit my job. or use the wireless option on my actual computer (unthinkable). so i’m going to install a switch at some point.

the way that i have them running is still imperfect, since in this case i haven’t assigned a new SSID to avoid having to climb up to where they’re hanging and give the cameras different wifi credentials, but i suspect that may be the last missing piece here to relatively reliable performance.

regarding dave’s earlier response, he is absolutely correct; i work for a fairly large ISP out west, and according to the questions we’ve asked you, we’ve determined the best package for your specific use case (streaming netflix) is gig fiber. (or whatever marketing now says fits within the stretch goal for average income). Since we’re pitching gig speed as the middle of the road package, if you use netflix AND a have smart thermostat you may need multi-gig for just $40 more.

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Luckily a “dumb” 5 or 8 port smart switch will run you like $15 on amazon, sometimes they drop to $10 or $12. The two typical ones are TP Link and Netgear and while they’re both pretty much identical, I use the TP links as they have a bit more port buffer memory built in - which really doesn’t matter that much but can’t hurt especially if you still have some 100M devices around. I also have a bit of a beef with Netgear so that factored in. But in reality, whichever one is cheaper, just get that. If possible get one with enough ports to move all your wired devices to it and just have one uplink from the switch to the router. The built in switches in the routers are typically lower spec than even these cheap dedicated ones. Though that’s assuming you don’t have any >1G devices, as a 2.5g switch will cost you a good amount more, in which case just stay with the 2.5g ports on the router.

Having wired backhaul is definitely going to be better, since the same stuff that is impeding the signal to the cams is impeding your wireless backhaul on that node (repeater in this case). Repeaters also cut the small bandwidth in half, so don’t really analyze any performance until you can get it hardwired permanently.

You don’t necessarily need to. The cams should pick that outdoor AP as the strongest signal. You can even just reboot your inside router (or disable wifi for a few seconds) to force them to the outside one, and they’ll stick there. But yes, if possible, having a second SSID would let you know that they are always connected to that AP, maybe wait and see if they don’t reliably stay on that one before getting out the ladder. In fact if the AP/router supports a guest network, make the main one the same as your inside one, that way when you are outside, your phone or laptop can roam to that AP seamlessly, then set the guest network with the second “outdoor cams” SSID, get your moneys worth out of this endeavor.

Plus if you sign up to allow your electric company to control your thermostat remotely, we’ll give you a $50 gift card. I’m having flashbacks to that South Park episode with the nipple rubbing.

I’m pretty heavy into networking, run lots of stuff out of my house that I use remotely, and 300/300 (the second 300 being the big win with fiber) is far more than I need. But it is the lowest you can get from FIOS and it costs me $25 a month, so fine with me. Ironically, the one time I could have used a lot more speed was recently when I uploaded around 500GB to Onedrive. But of course, looking at my real-time utilization, MS was throttling the upload to between 50 and 150mbit (they give you 150 at first but after a certain amount of transfer, throttle it back further), never even came close to 300.

That’s the other “gotcha”, you rarely (if ever) can hit those high speeds with a single user, other than to a good speed test site. You need many people downloading/uploading to even think about coming close to saturating the connection. Every major site out there that serves large uploads and downloads, even when they’re cached on something like Akamai or another CDN, throttles you. This is why I hate seeing people buying expensive 1+ gig internet pretty much to see a big number on a speed test site. There are very few people that have access to the private file sharing (torrent, etc) sites where you can actually hit those speeds.

The sad thing is I have a stack of enterprise gear that can do 10, 40, and 100 gig. Not that I would run any of it all the time as the power draw is insane, but I sort of feel like it is laughing at me and my 300M internet connection. I’ve sort of come full circle, I used to run enterprise gear and servers out of my house, with static IP and business class internet. Then it got to the point where outsourcing it was far cheaper, so I went to an Asus router (that I got on clearance for $35) with 3rd party firmware so I could have a lot of the flexibility I was used to. Now I’ve swung back a little bit to a happy medium of Ubiquiti router and APs (though that trusty 8 year old Asus still comes in handy from time to time).

But at least once a week I need to test something in the lab so can fire up the gear and shove tens of gigs a second through it, satisfies the “horsepower” addict in me.

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I don’t see an option like that on the TP-Link RE315 that @matthew_540012738 reported having. It’s possible to set different SSIDs for the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, but I haven’t seen a feature supporting a separate “guest” SSID, FWIW.

South Park cable guy: “Geez, that’s too bad.”

…or heat your house? :grin:

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when i checked, the main router does have a “guest network”, and even an “iot network” subselection on the main device, though i don’t believe it’s one of the things the extenders mimic.

good shout on these tplink switches; the main switch i use for the equipment in the other side of the house is netgear branded, and i recall costing around $50 probably 8 years ago. i recall having one of these a few years ago that i got secondhand and ended up donating to my church, further validating my cable hoarding tendencies. i will probably go ahead and order one of these.

regarding the south park episode, i found it very relatable - it all starts to add up when you realise what a ballache television service turns out to be from the provider side

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As usual, I’m much lazier than you and didn’t look it up, just said “if”. It may be worth investing in one of the TP Links that does have that feature, but not critical. Was just a “bonus” if it had support for it, and if @matthew_540012738 also wanted better wifi outdoors for their “regular” devices. Though they could also use that second SSID on their normal devices when outside too.

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Seriously, no joke. If I close the door to the room (which I often do as it is so loud when the stuff is running) it easily jumps up to 90 in there even in the winter. When I’m done, I open the door and cut down on my heat bill a bit.

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Yeah if it is an extender it won’t have it (I didn’t really pay attention to the model you mentioned). But if it has the RJ45 port on it to make it a wired extender (really an AP at that point) absolutely make use of it. If it is a dual band unit, you might be able to set the 5ghz to be the same as your inside SSID and that would serve your normal devices when you’re outside with them (just not at quite the same range as 2.4, but should be decent since there are no obstructions). The few extenders I’ve set up for people allow you to name the two differently, though I think they want you to use the same password as your inside unit, but that’s no big deal, the SSID is what differentiates them.

I cut the cord years ago. Honestly it was not the base rate for the service that I had an issue with. It was the “broadcast TV fee” that you could not get rid of even if you have an antenna and can get the local channels yourself, and the “regional sports fee” even if you wanted no sports channels (they won’t let you get rid of them). Those two together basically triple the cost of the most basic TV package on any provider. Then add on the equipment and all the other BS. I hardly watch TV so I’m not paying $100 a month for 20 channels, of which maybe 5 are of some interest.

A couple years ago I even moved my mom to streaming, she does need the local channels and at the time it was much cheaper for the services like Youtube TV that had the local channels, heck even Xfinity’s streaming option with local channels (and oddly, no broadcast TV fee) was much cheaper. But nowadays, the costs are pretty close, still a tad cheaper for streaming, but not having to deal with Xfinity is a bonus. Ironically since xfinity is her only choice for internet, and she is grandfathered in to a very low cost plan, they’re losing a lot of money since her TV streaming leaves their network (which costs them money) plus they aren’t getting any revenue from her for TV. But that’s the mentality of these mammoth corporations. Cut off their nose to spite their face. I can’t talk, I work for a massive international company (which also happens to be one country’s largest residential TV/Internet providers with all the same complaints as the big ones here) but luckily my division is very far removed from that. But we have our own ridiculous issues.

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That’s what I was thinking, too, about potentially leaving the 5 GHz the same as the main gateway’s SSID and setting up the 2.4 GHz as a pseudo “guest” or outoodors IoT. The RE315 that @matthew_540012738 is testing with should be able to do this. Thanks for confirming that thinking. :+1:

Years ago when I was living in a different (much larger) city and subscribed to cable Internet service (but not cable TV; I was using an indoor antenna), I decided to see what would happen if I removed the coax from the cable modem, plugged it into the TV, and let the TV do a channel scan. After learning that I could watch more channels that way (and with a better picture than with the antenna; this was before the digital broadcast switchover), I tried it with a splitter so I could have coax to the TV and cable modem at the same time. That worked surprisingly well. :grin:

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Yes, I miss the days of unencrypted basic cable. Most houses were just left live when someone cancelled, they didn’t bother to come out and disconnect it, and if they did often it was on the side of the house. Or if you had internet, you just had to remove the TV filter (assuming they didn’t put it up at the pole).

In college (long long ago) all the apartments were stacked and the coax ran through the closets. I was on the first floor so had plenty to choose from. There was something called a “scorpion tap” for coax that put two prongs in, one for the center conductor, one for the shield, and gave you an output. Just a matter of trying a few until you found a live one. This was back in the days when the cable company here had to run two coaxes to handle all the channels, so I just got an A/B switch (normally the box switched it for you depending what channel you chose, but obviously I had no box).

When I moved out, unless they looked with a magnifying glass, no sign anyone had ever tampered with it. But even the house I’ve lived in for the last 20 years, the first 5 or so it was still unencrypted and at the time, that was the only option for internet. They hadn’t even bothered installing a filter so it just always worked.

Now I have an antenna on the roof for the rare times I want to catch the local news or something. There are even some decent entertainment channels. Most are 1080i. They’re starting to roll out ATSC 3.0 around here but I’m not investing in a new TV for that, given that I rarely watch it.

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as far as I’m aware, at the time this company started doing tv it was across the board to remain competitive, but after a lot of changes to scope and an identity crisis the case turns out (im guessing) to be that it costs more to maintain the equipment, back-end functionality and whatever maintenance goes with it than it ends up making.

whoever counts the beans decided it doesn’t work as a product, but for contractual reasons between i guess tv content companies, provider companies, local govt orgs, much beyond my understanding, you can’t actually just stop providing the service, so the only alternative to stop providing it en masse is to make the price something outrageous. those fees you mentioned were what i imagine was the beginning of that move, taken to it’s logical conclusion by increasing the base rate every other month until people go away from it. that and preventing new signups.

from a functionality standpoint, i don’t see any reason to retain traditional television services in current day. at best it’s playing dice with the cable company over your bill for a novelty. even if you’re someone who has a need for live tv, there are streaming services (directv stream, youtube tv) catering specifically to that demographic by offering standalone streaming boxes with a live tv channel gui that look like DVRs. at

personally i don’t see why anyone would rather any of it than just having the files with the way things are going