My family is complaining of slow WiFi. I’ve triple checked that the AT&T Fiber is cranking 900+ Mbps up and down. The WiFi router is the latest Apple Airport Extreme. All the Wyze cams are set to SD resolution.
Is having too many Wyze cams on the same WiFi network clogging up the usage?
Most, if not all, residential routers have a maximum amount of devices per band that can be connected simultaneously. I would check the documentation and/or the support page for your router to see if that may be the issue.
All the devices including the Wyze cams are connected to the Apple Airport Extreme (latest model and firmware). I looked around in the Airport Utility, there is no config for setting the per device limit. Ugh…
I just cannot fathom, however, that Wyze would be clogging up the WiFi. But the circumstantial evidence says it is. I got three teenagers watching YouTube in HD, Netflix in HD, PS4, PCs, MAcBooks, iPads, iPhones, downloading/playing online games, Nest cams going all the time. No problem…all until I added the Wyze cams. Coincidence?
To give my prior comment some context. I have a R7000 Nighthawk router, and had many devices on the 2.4Ghz network, and just a few on my 5Ghz. After I added four additonal smart bulbs, 3 Google Home devices, and a smart switch, I started having issues with my router. I then researched how many devices I could attach simultaneously to my 2.4Ghz band. I discovered there was a 32 device limit per band. Since most of my smart devices are 2.4GHz, I surmised I need to get rid of a few. I disconnected any un-needed devices, and any excessive devices (too many bulbs) from that network. Bingo! My wife stopped dropping her work VPN connection, and my network stabilized. Knowing that I now plan on adding an AP to my network just for my smart devices.
@oaktree you are going to kill me. Yes, I have the AT&T Fiber for only $60/month and I get consistent 900+Mbps up and down. It never reaches 1Gbps (theoretical). No complaint!
Airport Extreme using the 5Ghz can reach about 400Mbps. Pretty good.
When I do the Internet bandwidth test, I connect directly (wired) to the AT&T router.
BTW, during when the WiFi is wonky…I do the direct Internet bandwidth test, no problemo!
I just want the Wyze cam to record to the local SD card. Now that I have many cams, our internet is slowing down for everyone (kids are complaining!).
What is the right setting to do continuous recording to local and NOT send any to the cloud? Thanks.
Have you tried turning off Event Recording for each camera? For each camera, click the gear in the upper right corner, select Event Recording, Turn off motion, sound and push notifications. This is where I would start. But, this would also turn off all motion detection. Continuous recording is under advance settings, local storage.
Thanks @OverWatch! I did the changes per your suggestion. My use cases do not require motion detection. I just need to record continuously to the local SD card in order to keep an eye out for a special need child.
The rest of the family is complaining about the slowness of the WiFi after installing three (only 3) of Wyze cams in the network. Does Wyze cam known to clog home WiFi network even in SD quality?
I can’t speak for Wyze and I can’t think of why three cameras would clog a network. I have 4 cameras and don’t see that. Once the cameras are set up and recording, you should be able to block their traffic off the network and have them still record. That’s an option, but I don’t think three clogging a network is normal.
Edit: Were you getting that many event notices on your Events page?
Probably should have been my first recommendation too.
Some friends have bought a 2nd wifi router and only let their cameras on that router to keep traffic segmented.
Three cameras spitting out one 12 second video every 5 minutes, really shouldn’t clog a network. Something else has to be going on. Now, if he and maybe someone else is watching live streaming all day monitoring a child, there would be more traffic.
We do live stream continuously to an iPad. But only one Wyze cam at a time. And it’s in SD quality so less than 80KB/s. And it’s no longer recording to the Cloud. That should not kill the WiFi.
And no, we have not reached 32 devices on the Apple Airport Extreme yet.
I might actually move all the Wyze cams to the AT&T router.
Can your Airport tell you what devices are using data at the time, or over time? Most modern routers will tell you that.
Perhaps that’s why Apple has discontinued them. Router technology got much more advanced while Airports languished. No longer competitive. But I’ll keep using mine until it dies.
Thanks everyone! Very informative.
Apple = Just Works = No touchy = Typical Consumer Use Cases
I moved all the Wyze cams to the AT&T router WiFi. The Wyze app was slow and video was choppy. Cheap free router.
I moved them to the Guest network on the Airport Extreme…much better all around. No one is complaining so far. I’ll report an update after several weeks. Cheers.
Glad that moving them off to your Guest network worked. I’m guessing that Apple has some QOS rules that Guest has a lower priority than your main network so it doesn’t clog up your main network activity. That being said, you probably have reached the limits of what your AirportExtreme can handle. I’d definitely recommend moving to a tri-band mesh network like Eero for a larger footprint house, or just a single fast tri-band router for a smaller footprint. And turn off the AT&T modem wifi antenna if you aren’t using it as it will interfere with your main wifi.
I love having Wyze cams for simple things I want to keep track of where something like a Ring cam or Arlo feels like way too much overkill. I have three so far, trained on my boiler/hvac, garage, and kitchen stove, but I’m planning on adding at least 3 or 4 more. I used to have issues with wifi on my older Nighthawk, but upgrading to an Orbi has fixed most if not all wifi issues. I just don’t recommend the Orbi because the software for configuring it is crap.
It could very well be another bottleneck in the network such as a bad switch or firmware on the router. Or as Oaktree has said. You’re just asking too much bandwidth for what your connection can handle. It’s a finite resource.
All access points / wireless routers can only listen to 1 device per band at a time, this means that if you have 32 wifi devices on a 3 band router, then each device can only “talk” to the router 1/11th of the time. This will result in slower than expected speeds on those devices and the devices may try to find a more available network during the time that they cannot talk to that access point, which looks like network instability/dropped packets/lag to the end user .
The common way to compensate for this in a commercial setting is to set up multiple wired access points with the same SSID, and limit their tx power so that you seamlessly roam from one access point to the next as you travel around the space. You can do this in a residential location as well, however, most people do not have their homes wired for ethernet. An alternative approach is to use wireless range extenders or powerline extenders, however both of these approaches will drop your speeds down, while increasing the apparent stability of the network.
The newer approach is to use so called “decentralized” or “mesh” access points, which are easier for a home user to set up and resemble wireless range extenders in the way that they work.