fyi, axis has a nice unit but its really pricey at 800
AXIS A8105-E Network Video Door Station
The ones that we all want really only seem to exist for the commercial world. Doorbird was seemingly our most hopeful and at $400, they have pretty much dropped the ball. Now that I have tommyd75 confirming that my experience is not isolated, I'm pretty upset. Doorbird should have acknowledged what I was saying a long time ago, instead they told me to check if my PoE switch was doing "scheduled reboots". I switched ports, did extra logging, setup a camera to record what I suspected was happening during random times of the day (the voice). All of this, to prove exactly what I asked them originally and they denied.
Imagine Doorbird gets very popular and there is one of these every few doors throughout a residential neighborhood. Like a church chime, you hear "The doorbird is now connected to the Internet" throughout the day, from various houses. Their engineering/QA team really thought this was ready to ship like that? Was I really the first one to go out and prove this is happening? The fact that they even have audible voices to report the state is ridiculous.
I'm giving the Doorbird support one more shot to acknowledge this and put it on a timeline along with my other issues. I'm hoping they can start seeing us as actual users that are trying to make their products better and have real issues. Short of that, I will write a review on Amazon (purchased it via Amazon) outlining all of this so all users are aware of their serious defects.
Another fun fact and annoying fact:
Time to connect via LTE using IOS APP (app closed, opened from scratch, to video stream):
Open Internet (via their cloud service): 6 seconds
Pre-connected IPSec VPN to LAN where Doorbird installed (mDNS discovery): 2 seconds
RTT to their cloud service (apicdvd.doorbird.net / 138.201.36.195 - Hosted with Hetzner):
from installed location: 101ms
from phone on LTE: 145ms
Total latency from my phone back to the Doorbird via their cloud: 101+145=
245ms
Total latency from my phone back to Doorbird location direct: 60ms
Maximum acceptable VoIP latency: one-way 150ms two-way 300ms
They are right on the edge of being acceptable from standard specs, from my single test location. And in my experience, the voice communication done via their cloud is NOT acceptable. But yea, according to them, their EU servers (server?) based are fine and none of their users are complaining. No plans to deploy US servers or allow a cloud bypass.
I wouldn't have expected that a German engineered camera would disappoint me more than a lot of the garbage I buy via Aliexpress.
