Very slow connection speeds during day time

Hey TRusselo

Is there any relationship at all between the number displayed and the wifi connection quality between camera and router? For instance:

  • When the connection quality is optimal, this number is the current variable bit rate of the stream.
  • When the connection quality is sub-optimal, will this number drop, irrespective of the demands of the scene it is encoding?

Im bit confused here. So we are looking at upload speed correct as oppose to download speed when we do a speedtest of your wifi or data on this? Thus if your upload speed is very slow like 1mbps or less, that mean you cant view the camera from your phone that well whether its your internet or wifi if upload speed is only 1mbps? What if your download speed is 10mbps or 50mbps?

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I’m feeling my way along here as well. Hands and knees with a mini-flashlight in my mouth. An honest man trying to ask a clear question. :slight_smile:

I advocate for diagrams to help make stuff more coherent:

At present there’s a paucity, imo.

The number you see on the screen has nothing to do with your wifi connection.

It is how many bytes per second the video file is being recorded at,
The number will not change depending on wifi speed.

My camera is 1 foot from a hardwired wifi access point inside the house,
I get the same numbers as you.

Your wifi connection will limit your ability to view live stream and uploading to the cloud

and yes Upload matters for your cameras to stream or upload to the cloud.

From the camera specs page on the Wyze website:

Connectivity Requirements: Upload speed 1.0 Mbps for SD and 1.5 Mbps for HD

So… if the camera is encoding the video at 300 kbps ( 0.3 mbps) you need that… plus the audio, plus network overhead… about 1.0 - 1.5 mbit total to live stream or upload, 2.0 mbps would be better to smooth out any spikes or fluctuations in the wifi signal. speed tests give an average over time…
If you are live streaming and uploading to the cloud at the same time you will need double that…

Make sure to run speed tests with your phone in the exact location of the camera to test speed…
Also realize that your smartphone will have a much better wifi chip, and wifi antenna than the 20$ wyze cam. You really DO get what you pay for…

If your speed is just not good enough, set the camera to record in SD instead of HD, it will need less bandwidth.

i dont understand how any of this could be explained in graphics… its wifi networking… it takes reading and learning… asking questions and googling for answers…

its pretty simple actually… if you dont have good enough wifi to watch live video without it skipping… you need more/better wifi.
Depending on the layout of your home, where your current router is located, and if your house has ethernet wiring at your phone jacks will dictate what your best course of action is for adding more wifi…
YouTube and google will help you there…
but the simplest option is a “Mesh Wifi system” such as “google wifi”. one plugs into the router, and you install the 2nd and 3rd devices in other areas/floors of your home using wifi.
these new fangled “mesh wifi systems” are basically really good repeaters and are much better than the 50$ junk repeaters that people usually go buy.
If your house is brick you may need to install an outdoor wifi access point…
wifi is like sound… gets stopped by dense material like glass, brick and stone…
once again go google “how wifi works” for a few days… time and energy Wyze does not have
(I do not work for wyze)

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Happy to report that I downgraded firmware back to 4.9.4.28 and connection speeds are normal again. Seems to be a firmware or hardware bug.

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Hello @mobstaj, while you were on the latest firmware did you submit any support ticket with logs attached through the Wyze app?

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I did not submit any support tickets but will do it tomorrow on one of my 2 or 3 other cameras exhibiting the same symptoms before I downgrade the firmware.

Okay great, when you do that can you come back here and send me over the ticket numbers?

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Well I submitted a support request via email from the app but don’t have a ticket yet. The camera I downgraded continues to have perfect throughput and clear picture. I attempted to downgrade another of the faulty cameras to the previous version and it continues to run at 20Kb/s daytime. When I turn on night mode it immediately clears up the picture and bandwidth quintuples but it becomes black and white. If I switch from HD to SD again, bandwidth actually increases.
Does anyone else have this problem?

I’ve attached a photo from another camera stuck at low HD

bandwidth.

Photo of same camera with higher bandwidth in SD mode.

This is a very weird bug so when you get the ticket number make sure to send it over so I can send this directly to the Wyze team. Thanks :smile:

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Wyze Ticket number is 201624. Thanks for the help!

Just sent it over to the team. Thank you for the help.

Hi TRusselo. There seems to be a disconnect here.

Your prior post caught my eye on this point - I had assumed it was data rate and when I saw your post I thought - hmm, maybe I’ve got this wrong. Now, I just donno. :slight_smile:

Cheers, -peep

in the post you quoted that person called it both video data rate, and called it transfer speed.

While I do not know 100% how it was coded, I can tell you this.

I have a distributed mesh wifi system with 5 access points all hardwired to the modem. you can get network transfer speeds of 700 megabit on 5G and 45 megabit on 2.4 G in any point on my property.

Right now i have my Wyze cam on my computer desk, 12 inches from the nearest wifi access point.

If i hold still and there is NO motion in the room the app hovers steady around 75 Kb/s, if i move a bit, hovers around 125 Kb/s, if i move alot, 300 Kb/s. All in HD and color…

If i turn off the lights and kick it into night vision mode, it hovers around 120 with no motion, and 170 with moderate motion…

The # at the top of the screen… changes depending on the colors and motion captured by the camera, not how good the wifi connection is.

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Hey @TRusselo

Interesting.

I’m going to qualify what I post by saying my understanding of (wireless) networking is not deep or wide. I know enough to be dangerous (ok, probably not dangerous, what am I gonna break - but I could certainly dig a deeper hole for myself to climb out of.) I’m learning and I appreciate your banging it around with me.

Here’s my brain dump, fwiw. i’m going to call “the #” → X

Complex scene, more unique data per frame, less compressible, higher volume of data to transmit, higher rate of transmission required to transmit it.

Static scene, more redundant data per frame, more compressible, lower volume of data to transmit, lower rate of transmission required to transmit it.

So, there’s a relationship between the compression rate and the data rate required to transmit it.*

Let’s say you have a static scene, virtually nothing moving, X fluctuating between 75-85 KBs. Often, prior to “connectivity” failing completely, X becomes irregular, falling below 75KBs, bouncing around but trending down, until it eventually pins at “0”.

In this case, doesn’t it seem to be reflecting the failing rate of data transmission?

* Is there? That’s what I’m contending, I guess.

well that could very well suggest that the # is actually the current transmission rate, (which in a perfect system would also be the current bitrate of the video).

but my point was to point out the number is not the current connection speed to the router (as the OP stated it), but actually the amount of data being transmitted.
The # should not be used to judge signal strength.

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I see your point, @TRusselo, thanks.

To conclude my original issue. I brought in one of the cameras that was acting slow during the daytime inside and plugged it in (and my apologies for not testing this sooner, it’s just that the cameras were mounted high up on the house outside and were a pain to get to). Inside, the speed was normal. They weren’t significantly closer to my wireless router but the speed was normal.

To make a long story short I was stupid and was daisy chaining two cameras out front and two cameras out back with the usb port on back of the first camera. I figured that was what they were for. The port just isn’t powerful enough to run another camera adequately. I still can’t figure out why they ran at normal speed at night time with the infrared lights on. Seems like that would draw more power, not less.

Anyway, lesson learned, don’t daisy chain Wyzecam 2’s. It’s probably in the manual. And as usual, I didn’t read it.

So apparently this is still an issue. I installed a new camera and am having problems with HD bring significantly lower image quality than sd. Seems to be a bitrare issue and is only evident during the daytime. Night time quality and bitrare are normal.


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