I LOVE T-Mobile, but I have been subjected to the issues you describe…sometimes latency, and fluctuating bandwidth, and I can confirm that when we have exhausted our priority data that sometimes speeds drop so low we can barely even open a website. That is certainly painful. We were able to get them to upgrade us to a First Responder priority classification because my wife owns some businesses related to health care, so that helped a lot, but our home internet use is WAY too heavy to keep their Home service now. In the last 30 days I’ve used almost 3TB of data. That’s a really heavy load that needs Fiber.
I can attest to the above. I have Rogers Wireless 5G Internet at the cottage. The service is sold as up to 100Mbps/10Mbps, the operative word being “up to”. As there is no 5G coverage in my area I get 36Mbps/11Mbps on the 4G band. Those are the maximum speeds my router has recorded so far. However, most of the time I am at 25Mbps/5Mbps occasionally dropping to 8Mbps/0.5Mbps, when that happens my four V3 are useless. They constantly disconnect and viewing SD footage is painful due to stuttering. Remote reboot, sometimes more than once fixes the issue as it establishes new connections to a new server. I was told that Rogers has three Canadian sever locations and two in the states that are owned by Xfinity. I’ve never seen being connected to any of Xfinity servers and the faster connection I get is when I connect to their Montreal servers. In short, latency and fluctuating bandwidth will render the cameras useless.
Your post has some very interesting data. It should be required reading.
Over time on this forum, I’ve developed a theory that the majority of complaints on this forum (>50%) are related to connectivity. What is most intriguing is your following statement.
“However, most of the time I am at 25Mbps/5Mbps occasionally dropping to 8Mbps/0.5Mbps, when that happens my four V3 are useless. They constantly disconnect and viewing SD footage is painful due to stuttering.”
The last sentence, SD footage says it all.
Your closing statement:
" In short, latency and fluctuating bandwidth will render the cameras useless."
This all adds to my theory about connectivity.
I realize this is a bit off topic but your post is excellent, excellent information.
That is 100% correct as most of us have the same cameras, same firmware and same app versions, the only uncommon denominator is the type of connection.
This and how much other traffic is on the network. The amount of data from camera X per Y is going to be the same amount. Even on a slower connection things like changing the default ISP DNS to a DNS server that resolves names faster, optimizing WiFi channels, providing wired backhauls or prioritizing target traffic or devices makes a huge difference.
I use Cloudflare DNS and optimize the networks weekly or every time a new device is brought onboard. In addition to 82 WiFi clients we have over 180 IOT devices on a Hubitat Hub so I make sure none of them are bombarding the network with unnecessary traffic.
I use cloudflare for a lot of stuff including hosting my own domains’ DNS records and proxying/protecting some websites. In my case though, their non-authoritative servers actually perform a lot more slowly than my ISP (Verizon FIOS). Typically I’d say ISP DNS is terribly unreliable (mostly the case with Xfinity) but Verizon inherited their DNS infrastructure from one of the big old internet backbone companies, I want to say maybe Qwest or Level 3. They are by far the fastest (using namebench and GRC DNS benchmark) and have been 100% reliable, so for me they work best. I don’t need any of the DNS filtering for malicious sites or ads, etc, just want raw performance. For people that want those features, there are a few good ones out there like Cloudflare, Quad9, etc, just a matter of benchmarking to see which one is fastest for your area.
It isn’t uncommon for ISP DNS to be the fastest for many people since it is usually right in their local network and has plenty of queries cached. But if they are unreliable or you need those filtering features, then looking elsewhere can be beneficial.
With FIOS I do manually specify the ones that don’t give you advertisements when you mis-type a hostname, as I find that annoying. I also use Level 3’s 4.2.2.x (second fastest for me) as backup in case Verizon has an issue. Now that Lumen owns the Level 3 infrastructure, we’ll see if they remain fast and reliable, I may have to choose a new secondary DNS.