IP Cameras Throttling Bandwidth

M

mike s.

Young grasshopper
Dec 12, 2014
40
4
I've been tormenting the Blue Iris pros at IP Cam Talk for a while now. Now, I have a more general IP camera issue:
After noticing very slow Internet when Internet searching with wireless laptops, I found that my typical 16 mbps download speed was running at 4 mbps or less (sometimes only 1 mbps). A desktop connected only to the router by LAN (the desktop has no wireless) is consistently getting 16 mbps. I thought it was a problem with my router. I spent a good amount of time with D-Link tech support, and resetting the router (at their request) cured the problem. But resetting the router had turned off my 4 IP cameras, too. Once I got the cameras running again, I had the same problem. I then found that I could "toggle" the slow speed problem simply by turning Blue Iris (and the 4 IP cameras) on and off. The router is a DIR-825 dual-band (2.5 and 5 ghz), but the IP cameras are all only 2.5 ghz. I realize that using the 5-ghz band for the laptops should work for me, but neither laptop I own is 5-ghz compatible (yet) and the reach of the 5-ghz band is (in my home, at least) only half what the 2.4 ghz band is. I have a dual-band wifi extender/repeater, but even with that, I don't get 5-ghz service at the fringes of the house.
Is this a common problem? Even with the cameras sucking up so much bandwidth, they are often stalled (the Blue Iris yellow triangles) by poor bandwidth or something. I'm getting a 5 ghz USB adapter and I'm sure it will help when using the laptop in the center of the house, but due to the poor reach of 5 ghz, it's not going to work everywhere I'd like it to.
Is there someone out there savvy enough to calculate whether the bandwidth being sucked up by the IP cameras is normal?
I'm running WPA and TKIP per D-Link tech support suggestion. I ran a channel search and found that all 14 channels are "full star" (neighbors are not close enough to cause me any interference). Any help greatly appreciated!
 
First off, never never never run your cameras on the same physical ethernet switch as the rest of your network, UNLESS you are running enterprise grade equipment and can vlan off your cameras, but even then, some lower end enterprise grade equipment don't have enough bandwidth in their switching fabric to sustain full thruput with a bunch of chatty cameras on the network. What I did was get a cheap 8 port PoE switch, put all of my cameras on the PoE Ports, put my BI machine and NVR (yes I'm running both) on the non PoE ports on the switch, then uplink the switch to my main network. The camera switch goes bonkers all day long 24x7 with tons of traffic, but the rest of my network cruises along with full speeds because of the physical isolation factor.. The only time that any traffic is passed onto the main network is for remote viewing of BI or the NVR.

Secondly, WiFi and cameras are a no-no... they are too chatty to sustain any decent thruput. There are many thruput calculators on the net, that will help you figure out how much bandwidth is being used.

Hardwiring everything will be your best bet period, and will avoid things like drop outs, poor image quality, and crappy performance.
 
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@mike s. what cameras are you using? What does Blue Iris indicate the bandwidth to be?
On a wired network there is no issue, but on wifi a high bitrate on several cameras can cripple the network.
 
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no surprise that 4 HD wifi cameras have completely destroyed your wifi network..

you have two choices...
1. Wire them Up
2. Get rid of them

WiFi is shared throughput, the more devices on your wifi the slower everything is for all the devices... with four devices streaming high throughput 24/7/365 there is nothing left for normal Wifi use.

I get 100Mbps internet access off my Wifi with over a dozen devices.. but I dont have anything streaming video on the wirelesss... cameras, tv streamers, etc.. are all hardwired.
 
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Well, that sucks. I bought wireless IP cameras so I wouldn't have to run wire all through the house, through exterior walls, etc.
Can't find where Blue Iris shows bandwidth used. The cameras are various types of Foscam. Still working on what a PoE switch is.
I noticed that disabling the cameras in BI doesn't open up the bandwidth; only shutting BI down does.
 
your not the first, and you wont be the last.. If you want Security cameras they need to be hardwired, if you want a few Web cameras you can use WiFi to a point.

it is stupid easy to knock any wifi device off its network, hell I could spend 5mins and convert any microwave into a WiFi jamming device.. not to mention a simple phone app is capable of doing the same via other means.. due to this there not suitable for security use and nobody seriously uses them for security, except for under educated individuals with no business setting up a security system.. I feel the same way about wireless security systems, a few wireless sensors here and there are acceptable in a pinch.. but a whole system that is completely wireless has a HUGE backdoor that is easy to detect and exploit.

Wireless performance is constantly varying and always susceptible to external forces you have zero control over, this is the last thing you want to pair with a security system thats supposed to be 100% reliable 24/7/365, tust me.. even with 99% reliability Murphy's law dictates that you will be victimized in that 1% window, the bastards dont even need to know about your wifi issues to exploit them.

PoE is providing power to the camera over the network cable, so you only need to run one cable to each camera from a central location as both power and data use the same ethernet cable.. this provides many advantages, such as solid network performance secured physically inside your property; paired with an effective battery backup system so you can keep recording during/after a natural disaster or other power outage.
 
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So the Foscam ethernet slot can take power through the LAN-type network cable instead of through its power input socket?
 
probably, you should pull up the spec sheet your self and verify it supports PoE/Power over Ethernet.. and what type and voltage, it will be listed under POWER or something.

There are professionals whom can pull an ethernet cable nearly anywhere you need for a nominal fee if this is something that you cant deal with on your own... If installed correctly you can use that cable for just about any future network cameras you might want to upgrade to.. its pretty future proof at this point to pull a network cable to a good camera location.. yeah it costs more and is more work but its worth it.
 
mike s. said:
So the Foscam ethernet slot can take power through the LAN-type network cable instead of through its power input socket?
Click to expand...
Not likely...very few foscams can do this...if you are running cheaper foscams they are likely MPEG cameras that are bandwith hogs..what models?
There are MUCH better options over foscam. Also, you may consider hiring a low voltage professional to run ethernet for you...this will allow you to use any camera including higher quality hikvision/dahua cameras and use POE to power them.
 
I'll look into the specs. Yes, MPEGs. I can run the wiring; just don't have that great of a need to go through the effort. The cams are more for watching the dogs when we're away, than for security. They work well enough for that usually, and it's not a biggie to shut down BI when we're home...
 
agreed, if your just using them as dog web cams when your away you might as well stick with wireless, as long as your aware of the limitations.. just keep em powered down when you dont need them and they wont effect your day to day wireless performance..
 
Two things I will add:

1. You may get better wireless performance overall if you get a couple of Ubiquiti UniFi access points. They are a bit of a pain to set up since it requires you to install bloated software on your PC to configure them, but they are relatively cheap and better WiFi than most older routers. Install them throughout the house in areas closer to the cameras. They do need to be wired to the network for optimal performance though.

2. Your WiFi uses more than just the one channel you set in the router. Some of the neighboring channels are used as well. Suffice it to say the most efficient way to use the channels is to ONLY USE channels 1, 6, or 11. These typically do not interfere with each other so there can be 3 networks in the same area with no interference to each other as long as everyone sticks to one of those channels. Unfortunately, most people are unaware of this so they might choose, for instance, channel 5 like one of my neighbors does, and they take up more of the wireless spectrum than they should with no benefit to anyone. Think of it like a small grocery store that only has 3 parking spaces. If you choose channels 2,3,4,5,7,8,9, or 10, then you are double parking, leaving enough space for only one more car. To make things worse, some routers allow you to use 40 MHz of spectrum instead of the standard 20. This makes you use twice as much of the very limited wireless spectrum, which dramatically increases your chance of interference and poor performance, and as such you should never allow the router to use 40 MHz unless you live in the middle of nowhere and have no neighbors.
 
Understood. Am wondering why disabling the cameras in BI doesn't open up the bandwidth, and that I have to shut down BI completely to free up the bandwidth. If I assume it's because the cameras are still running whether disabled in BI or not, then they would still be running when BI is shut down. So this doesn't make sense to me.
 
You are right. The cameras should not be still running when BI is shut down. Maybe you could look at the Windows task manager to see if network traffic levels are affected by disabling the cameras.
 
I have a few MJPEG wireless cams still that I need to replace, but they do still transmit to the wifi network regardless of what you have viewing them. For instance, just disabling the cams in BI does not stop them from broadcasting to your wifi network. They will continue to spam your wifi as long as they are powered on and linked to your network. This causes a very large amount of traffic on the wifi. I am puzzled that you regain network bandwidth just by shutting down your BI server. I know my wifi cameras are still sending destinationless packets to the network even when I don't have something like a viewer up and connected to them.
 
but they do still transmit to the wifi network regardless of what you have viewing them
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That sounds like they are set to multicast the stream as opposed to uinicast it.
A normal unicast RTSP stream will terminate when the timeout expires if there is no 'keepalive' response to maintain it.
 
alastairstevenson said:
That sounds like they are set to multicast the stream as opposed to uinicast it.
A normal unicast RTSP stream will terminate when the timeout expires if there is no 'keepalive' response to maintain it.
Click to expand...

Since these are cheap cameras they do not have an RTSP stream, only MJPEG so yes, I believe they are multicasting.
 
MJPEG streams are usually done with HTTP (which doesn't operate with multicast). These must be odd cameras.

I wonder if all the camera streams are being sent to all wireless devices simultaneously (including the other cameras). That would get out of control really fast.
 
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