I have 4 wyze v2 cameras installed in my cabin that I have been using for the last 3 years. Never had any issues with them, however recently something has been using excessive amount of data on my home network. This is an issue because in that location I can only get my internet connection from LTE and I have 50GB monthly data cap. This has never been an issue up until now.
As I have a very basic setup, I have no way of checking the usage on the router (no traffic analyser on this model) so I cannot confirm if this is caused by cameras or another device, however the increased use started after I upgraded my plan from Cam Plus Lite (so 12s videos with 1 minute cooldown) to Cam Plus Unlimited.
Moreover, when checking my ISP data I noticed that there there is very high daily data usage even when nobody is here or there are people but no actuall data was used (e.g. 8 GB of data used from 11 pm to 3 am). All together this leads me to the conclusion that it’s Wyze cameras eating up all my data plan. The weird thing though is that at the same time only a handful of events are recorded in the Wyze app (less than 10 for most days, and often none at all). I also don’t really use live view (maybe 5-10 minutes each month tops). The only other device constanlty connected to this network is a smart wifi socket and a zigbee bridge, none of which is really capable of using any serious amount of data.
Is there a way to check actual data transfer for each camera on the Wyze side? Surely there is a log available somewhere, if not for actuall data transfered then at least for when the camera is communicating with the server and transmitting. Or is there any other way to estimate real data usage of these cameras? At the moment I can’t switch them off and can’t replace the router for one with more complex data usage analytics.
No, there is nothing in the phones or app that will tell you how much data you are sending. That is something that I can do via my WiFi access points (not part of my router). My router can also monitor traffic for any particular IP address. For example is is a report from my WiFi for a few of my cameras. Since a put the camera type as part of the name, you can see what the cameras are. The usage (for the last week) is the next to the right column. In case you are wondering why camera 35 is so high, it’s because that camera has been flashed for RTSP and is continuously streaming to my Lorex NVR.
Thanks for the reply, unfortunately neither my routrer nor my AP can give me that kind of statistics as these are both very basic models. I even tried flasing the AP with OpenWRT to get that extra functionality but with no success. So I could switch off cameras and start turning them on one by one but I really need to keep them running when I’m not there for security reasons. Thanks again.
The fact that it started when you upgraded to Cam Plus tells me it is probably the AI detection features, if I’m not mistaken, that requires sending a constant live feed from each camera to their servers for analysis. Try disabling person/pet/package detection and see if your use goes back down.
Does your router have anything at all, like current utilization? At least then you can see if/when it drops. If not I guess you have to rely on your ISP’s reporting.
I’m surprised OpenWRT doesn’t have something, while their features do vary by router model, that’s a pretty basic one, at the very least you should be able to see current up/down rate.
A quick calculation based on my OGs says 4 cams streaming constantly would use up around 2.5 gigs per hour (the v2 may use a bit less, so 8 gigs for 2 hours sounds just about right).
My ASUS router (which acts as AP) doesn’t have OpenWRT support, unfortunately (it’s one of the most basic ones RT-N19). But the actual LTE modem/router should have live transfer monitoring. I might have to wait till tomorrow when the data package restarts as currently speed is capped at 0.5 Mbps or thereabouts.
Thinking about it, thought, it makes even more sense given I now have much less events recorded as I stopped getting all the notifications for stuff like spider webs, moths etc. So it might indeed be the case that now my feed is sent somewhere for automatic ID.
I would suspect that is your cause. Now that you’re capped at 0.5 I’m guessing the AI detection probably isn’t working anymore.
You may want to disable those features before your data resets so you don’t just eat through it all tomorrow. Then you can test if the bandwidth increases when you re-enable it on one camera. But It certainly sounds like that’s your cause, and you probably won’t be able to use the AI features with your 50GB cap, even a single cam will use that up in a month.
I am in a similar situation, ever since upgrading the CamPlus Unlimited my cameras are just failing too stay connected. Part of it is the subpar ISP supplied router, but even with my own Eero 6 router the cameras were eating bandwidth. Not so much when I was on Cam Lite.
I just got confirmation that we are getting fibre installed in the next 12 months so I can then re-enable the AI detection. For now I might have to stick to the dummy one. Thanks again for your advice.
Lucky you! I have had my fiber at home for about 3 years and LOVE IT!!! In all honesty I don’t really need Gig up and down, but it sure is nice to have…
That certainly doesn’t seem to be what people here are seeing. Perhaps they have tons of bugs or other motion but the 8 gigs in 4 hours matches up with continuous stream from 4 cams.
If they have a continuous stream of bugs (or moving shadows, leaves, rain, snow or whatever), they’ll be uploading a continuous stream of 5m max events to the cloud for AI processing. That’s basically the same as saying:
And again, it makes a lot of sense because in Cam Lite there was a 12s limit every 5 minutes (if I remeber correctly, maybe it was every minute), so now with all the bugs etc it’s probably sending a lot more.
The question is now how can I move some of my cameras back to Cam Lite and leave others (that are connected to unlimited internet) on Cam Unlimited? Because they were all automatically upgraded, despite me wanting to leave some of them on the limited plan.
I have CamPlus Unlimited. Look at the screen capture in the 2nd post of my data usage. Compare camera 35 which is RTSP flashed and sending continuous video to my NVR. The only other one that about less than half that is looking at a data networking device with constantly flashing LEDs and is therefore almost continuously sending data to Wyze. The rest are well under by an order of magnitude less data. So no, CamPlus Unlimited does not mean continuous uploading to Wyze unless you have continuous motion events.
Yes, it’s 12s max event followed by a 5m cooldown.
I don’t think there is a way currently. I even tried doing a factory reset, and skipping the “Add to your unlimited plan” step during setup. The app added it anyway. I tried using an old app that still had the UI to remove cam from CP/CPU. It removed the cam and a few seconds later added it back to the plan. I’ll tag @Mavens to see if any have come up with a way to move from CP/CPU to CPL.
That is my biggest gripe with Wyze now, plus deleting cloud footage after removing a camera from an account. Looks like Wyze is trying to copy Apple in keeping closed echosystem
