Data Usage Per Camera Per Month

Already released to public. Pan 4.10.2.27+ and v2 4.9.3.64+.

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Thanks!

The fixes were released on 12/17/18. Do you still see increasing data usage after you upgraded to the latest firmware? If there is I would like to know how much data they send and investigate. Thanks!

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Comcast is stroking you, they told two elderly family members the same thing in order to attempt to get them to upgrade their monthly service or pay an additional fee.

There is no way 5 cameras at 150KB/s intermittently can generate 1 TB of data in a month. It is NOT possible, period. 320GB is 80 FULL DVD movies (@4GB each) streaming. That is 2.67 movies, per day, every day, for the entire month, streaming. Let alone 1 TB of transferred data in 1 month. 1 TB is more than 3 times that amount. That is equivalent to more than 240 FULL DVD movies (@4GB each) downloaded.

Hope this helps,

Thanx,

73ā€™

Tuna

It should not. Hereā€™s how you can test this. Start streaming from the microSD card to your phone while on the same local network. Then disable internet by either (1) unplugging the modem, if the modem and router are separate, or (2) unplugging the CTV cable or phone line from the router. Test on another device that you cannot get out to the internet. You should see the local playback stream continue uninterrupted.

I can say I tested local lan playback and it is local traffic, not internet.

And to the post that says this isnā€™t possible with the Wyze cams, that is an untrue statement. I worked with support and it looks like they have solved the issue but I had 1 camera upload over 300gb in 6 days.

I had similar issues with the cameras (two) that took my Comcast account just shy of 1TB last month (January 2019). My December use was about 50% more than the previous months. I donā€™t have the kind of monitoring software on my router, so I had to go with the tried and true ā€œjust unplug itā€. I unplugged both cameras and the data use slowed considerably. Iā€™m going to plug them in and make sure theyā€™re current (although, Iā€™m 96% sure they are.).

Then on the 26th or 27th of this month, Iā€™ll leave them on and see if my data use goes back up.

Anyone else still having this issue? I bought one camera a couple months ago, and noticed a big increase in my data usage from the cable company. Like other posters here, I thought it could be related to other devices I added to my network. But about two weeks ago I added 7 more Wyze cams to my house, and now my entire monthly cap has been blown about halfway through my billing cycle. The only devices iā€™ve added in the last two weeks are the 7 wyze cams. I donā€™t live stream more than a minute or two every other day. Iā€™ve updated to the latest firmware on all the cameras when I installed them.

My data usage per camera so far this month is as follows:
Cam1 - 700MB
Cam2 - 1.74GB
Cam3 - 1.37GB

The vast majority of that usage is Upload to Amazon AWS, so that roughly tracks with the number of events itā€™s probably uploading per day.

I do see about 1.5MB Download on each camera from Amazon CloudFront (content delivery/load balancing) and about 45MB Download on each camera of ā€œuncategorizedā€ traffic. I donā€™t have super detailed traffic analysis turned on for my network so I donā€™t know what that could be.

If your bandwidth cap is low that might be a problem, but most home internet plans have at least 200GB (mine is 500GB).

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Unfortunately I donā€™t have a way to track per-device bandwidth usage, so I canā€™t look at the individual cameras to see their actual upload/download. But I just checked, and Iā€™ve actually used 75% of my 2,000 GB monthly allowance from the cable company in just 10 days. Again, the only thing Iā€™ve changed is adding 7 wyze cams in the last two weeks. Iā€™m going to unplug all of them and i guess try to buy some monitoring device before i turn them back on.

Wow, 1.5TB in 10 days is a lot of data :astonished:

The above data is pulled from my home router (Asus RT-AC68U). Many routers have traffic analysis built-in so if you havenā€™t already you could check yours (sometimes itā€™s buried in a menu).

If you donā€™t have traffic analysis on your router you could look for a Asus RT-AC56U or RT-AC68U router which can be found for about $40-50 new, less used, You could either replace your current router or set up a new network just for your Wyze Cams while you monitor traffic.

If you donā€™t want to buy new hardware, you could set up a computer to share its ethernet connection via WiFi and connect the Wyze Cams to that, then monitor traffic as it flows through the computer. Lots of software options but it requires some technical knowledge to set up.

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I canā€™t track individually either, however AT&T shows that Iā€™ve only used 98GB this period - which ends in 3 days. Thatā€™s Netflix, Google Home Hub, and four Wyze Cams all connected an motion tracking.

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WOW. Even if you viewed all 7 of your cams from outside your house 24/7, I estimate you wouldnā€™t generate more than 200-250 GB of data usage. Add 10 GB in a month to upload and download 20 cloud clips a day from 7 cams (thatā€™s a lot of clips, lol) and it wouldnā€™t be much bigger. And thatā€™s with ALL of your cams streaming outside the house 24/7, which certainly isnā€™t normal. Most people view their streams from inside their house, and the cloud clips are the biggest factor.

It certainly shouldnā€™t challenge a 2,000 GB limit. Either there is a malfunction, or other factors are coming into play.

Stream TV & movies, or download them? Do it in UHD? Play sophisticated online games 24/7? In virtual reality? Got any kids, lol?

The only time I ever exceeded my 1,000 GB allocation was long before I got my first camera, and that was when I downloaded entire libraries of TV shows and movies to my computer for future use. I still average 400 GB a month doing downloads, but the first month I had 6 cameras online my data usage was only 115 GB (and that included the downloads!)

So yeah, Iā€™d find that 4.5TB/month leak QUICK, even if itā€™s a malfunctioning camera!

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yeah, super frustrating. I do have kids, and we have lots of devices, but we havenā€™t changed any of our behaviors significantly in years, and never had a problem before. I donā€™t even have any UHD devices. By my calculations, even if both my kids were streaming YouTube 24h a day it still wouldnā€™t add up to this much data. So thereā€™s very clearly something malfunctioning - and it started about the time my Wyze Cameras went online so itā€™s as good a place as any to start. This would be so much easier if any of my equipment offered usage breakdowns - but the cable company just has a running total, and my Netgear Orbi has basically the same thing. I saw some suggestions for older routers - anyone have suggestions for some kind of monitoring device I could purchase?

Well, with a data leak of 6 GB/hour, even a running total may work. Just remove equipment and watch the running total. Try to do this when the network is quiet.

BTW, if I downloaded 24/7 at my cable speed, I could blow thru my 1,000 GB limit in less than a day and a half. So itā€™s not just if any of your familyā€™s behaviors have changed in general, but whether anyone has done anything special once this month.

Edit: Had to up the size of the data leak ā€“ forgot this was only over 10 days!

All network traffic has to pass through the monitoring device to be analyzed, so a router is the natural device to use. I havenā€™t seen a dedicated piece of hardware like an inline bandwidth monitor, but if someone knows of one Iā€™d like to see it. Bandwidth and traffic monitoring is a pretty common request from a lot of home users and Iā€™m surprised at the lack of monitoring in most home routers. The closest Iā€™ve seen is the Circle network monitoring device for families, but itā€™s focused on how long a particular person has been using the internet per day, not how much and what kind of traffic.

Managed switches can show bandwidth info but are geared toward business use and have business-sized price tags.

Yeah, I use Circle, it comes ā€œbuilt inā€ to the Netgear Orbi router series, but as you say itā€™s pretty lame. I can see a log of IPs/sites that are being requested, but nothing about bandwidth. Iā€™m trying out PRTG at the moment, weā€™ll see if iā€™m lucky enough that the offender is visible there.

Yeah, I saw PRTG pop up in searches but Iā€™ve never used it. Let us know if it works!

I also saw that Orbi used to have per-device monitoring but they dropped it in newer versions of the firmware. There are some pretty long forum threads and a request to have it reinstated that seems to have died out a while ago.

Something doesnā€™t make sense. I have 7 cams, all on, all the time. Checking my data usage, Iā€™m averaging 2.5 to 3GB/per day. If the trend continues, for an average billing period Iā€™d have about 75 to 90GB a month. In the first 8 days of this billing cycle, Iā€™ve used 24GB, and most of that has been streaming Google Music.

Well, I hardly use any data, but since I have installed 2 Wyze V2 cams my data has increased tremendously (for me) I use less than 1 gb a month and in one week alone since installing the cameras itā€™s at 3.2 gb just for the Wyze app. I have NO alerts on any camera. Whatā€™s going on with this? If I canā€™t figure it out Iā€™ll have to unplug them and stop using them.