Camera Networking Question

[valleyforge]

Hi All,
I have been preparing to extend my networked security cameras to an adjacent rental property. I have two options, although there may be others I haven't thought of.


My house and the rental property house are about a mile apart.


Option 1:
I have a Ubiquiti line of sight transmitter to cameras and a switch about 1/2 way to the rental house from my house.


There is not a direct line of sight to the rental house as it is heavily wooded, but the driveway is straight line with 90 degree turns at each end. I have power at each turn, so I could install additional line of sight transmitters to form a link back to my house.


I don't think there would be a problem having several line of sight devices connected in series, but have not confirmed that anyone has done that. I have found that IP addressing and resolving gets somewhat unpredictable when cameras are connected to the far end of a line of sight device, but it may be I have not configured the line of sight devices properly.


My cameras at the far end of the Ubiquiti line of sight transmitter work with BI, but my IP determination software gives me different IP addresses than BI thinks it is when I initially configure the cameras on my workbench.


Option 2:
The rental house has DSL like my house does and it is in my name, so I can access it should it be desired.


This option would be accessing the remote cameras over DSL modem/switches via the phone company, but I have even less info as to anyone actually doing this.




I made a post on the forum a few months ago regarding this general course of action and got a response from a senior member that I had the right idea for the DSL route, but had the wrong idea on how to implement it. I got distracted by other higher priorities and am now trying to revisit the situation.


There have been several break-ins in the past week or so and we have only 3 deputies to cover a county the size of Massachusetts.


The majority of the population is at the far end of the county, so we are pretty much on our own.


If the line of sight series is feasible, I will use it for several other locations, even if the DSL option is better for this one.


Comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[bp2008]

Ubiquiti wifi beats DSL any time you can do good links. Use 5ghz equipment and make sure you separate the frequencies of adjacent wireless links by at least the size of the channel width, and you should be all set. At your repeater locations you won't even need a switch unless you want to put a camera there too. Also reduce output power on the radios wherever you can to keep the airwaves quieter for everyone else. At the distances you are talking about, minimum output power is likely fine.

If you google for ubiquiti bridge setup instructions it is easy to configure these radios so they function just like a network cable and they won't block your DHCP traffic so ip addressing works just like everything is local. The trick is keeping your rental property's internet router from fighting with your main house's internet router over DHCP addressing. You can firewall the DHCP traffic at one of the radios but then you must take care to prevent ip conflicts. You can give each router a different subnet but then it isnt easy to route between the two subnets. It might be better to just cancel the second DSL and share one internet connection over the wireless bridges so you are only dealing with one router.

 

[turbov6camaro]

you have to watch on many repeater Jitter can happen and cause the video feed to look real bad. I would personally just use the DSL and make a VPN between the houses. you can use cameras with onboard SD cards, since you may have to reduce quality over the DSL.

 

[bp2008]

Living in a heavily wooded area as opposed to suburban, I bet his DSL upload speed is less than 1 Mbps. In other words maybe enough for one camera at greatly reduced quality, at the cost of the internet sucking at his rental property.

At short distances with clear line of sight, he is likely to have a very solid and stable 100 Mbps link even if it takes 3 ubiquiti bridges to get from point A to point B. I've personally had great success running a Dahua 2 megapixel PTZ camera over 3 ubiquiti links in a chain like this, except these spanned a quarter mile, 9 miles, and 17 miles to get between me and the camera, not just one mile.