With so little bandwidth required - why do I read about concerns for router bottlenecks? Is it because the camera streams are competing with data streams? Is a managed switch that uses QoS, or some other priority-management tool, a good solution?
Cameras connected to Wifi routers (whether wifi cameras or not) are problematic for surveillance cameras because they are always streaming and passing data. And the data demands go up with motion and then you lose signal. A lost packet and it has to resend. It can bring the whole network down if trying to send cameras through a wifi router. At the very least it can slow down your entire system.
Unlike Netflix and other streaming services that buffer a movie,
these cameras do not buffer up part of the video, so drop outs are frequent. You would be amazed how much streaming services buffer - don't believe me, start watching something and unplug your router and watch how much longer you can watch NetFlix before it freezes - mine goes 45 seconds. Now do the same with a camera connected to a router and it is fairly instantaneous (within the latency of the stream itself)...
The same issue applies even with the hard-wired cameras trying to send all this non-buffer video stream through a router. Most consumer grade wifi routers are not designed to pass the constant video stream data of cameras, and since they do not buffer, you get these issues. The consumer routers are just not designed for this kind of traffic, even a GB speed router. QoS doesn't help and over time the lost packets add up and bring the router to its knees.
We see stuff like this all the time here, including
just last week. As soon as someone takes the camera traffic load off the router everything improves, just like the guy last week.