Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit it?
Hi all,
We had been having issues at my house with slow network speeds. The Orbi was saying 443mb/s, but we were seeing fractions of that. After investigation with a hardline and device by device connection, we found that a security camera a roommate put in his room was sucking up all the bandwidth. If this device is connected, hardwire connections drop down to 100-140mb/s, and wifi drops down to 20mb/s.
What options are available to us in segregating this device? There's 5 users in the house, so to have 1 device consuming 75% of the bandwidth is flat unacceptable for the rest of us, and we need to find a solution that permits the rest of us to have bandwidth, but his security camera still function. He's mega paranoid after an assistant to the pool cleaner was caught robbing the house. Right now the guest network is off. Can we enable the guest network and limit that device? Is there VLAN tagging that can be done for that IP camera? RBR50 Router with 2 satellites. Any help would be great.
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
Whats the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem the RBR is connected too. The RBR50 is not a modem.
There is Traffic Meter however it only tracks the over all usage of the entire system and bandwidth. Not per device.
Only other item I might suggest would be a firelwall appliance device infront of the RBR and then set the Orbi system to AP mode. Use the firewall appliace to help regulate the bandwidth. Not sure which firewall appicance that would have these features. There are many.
You might ask this user to see if he might have any recommendations:
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
You will need to change the configuration of the security camera. You do not state if it is streaming video to the cloud 24/7, but if it is, then this is probably why your bandwidth is being consumed rapidly by it.
You can change various options, such as:
reduce resolution of the stream to the cloud (i.e. stream 640x480 rather than 4K)
change streaming to the cloud to instead stream to a NAS or local network share path, then your ISP bandwidth is not consumed by the camera
configure it to only stream video when motion is detected
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
I'm relying on my roommates information, as it is configured in his room. I'll try to get more information for you. If there is a cable modem preceding it, we may have more options. I'll have to wait for the house meeting tonight.
We had been having issues at my house with slow network speeds. The Orbi was saying 443mb/s, but we were seeing fractions of that. After investigation with a hardline and device by device connection, we found that a security camera a roommate put in his room was sucking up all the bandwidth. If this device is connected, hardwire connections drop down to 100-140mb/s, and wifi drops down to 20mb/s.
What internet speed are you paying for?
How are you measuring network speed? Using a web site such as SpeedTest.net or Fast.com? Or, looking at device reports on the Orbi "app".
When the Orbi app report is the "Link Rate" of the connection, not the actual realized throughput.
Good luck with the house meeting. If the camera is affecting everybody, that is by definition "Everybody", including the person with the camera. My security cameras have settings for when to record and what resolution to use. Also, a "security" camera that is intended to document intrusions would seem to be superfluous when the owner is in the house. It would be interesting to know which camera this is. Surely it's not a breach of security to report that an unknown person in an unknown location owns a (Wyze Cam? Nest Cam? ...)
As a last observation, when I stream one of my cameras to my cell phone through the internet, it uses a maximum of 250Kb/s, which is one fourth of a megabit. And, it's all going "up" and has no effect on the "down" performance that most of us are using all day long.
You will need to change the configuration of the security camera. You do not state if it is streaming video to the cloud 24/7, but if it is, then this is probably why your bandwidth is being consumed rapidly by it.
Tackle this from the camera end and don't mess around with routers and stuff. Why should you have to jump through hoops to get decent Internet? If the worst comes to the worst, then block the IP/MAC address of that camera.
Better, tell the house mate to get a camera that is not antisocial.
Something simple like and Arlo Q Plus isn't going to eat bandwidth. It can also record locally and will leap into action only when something happens.
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
We came to an agreement. The roommate cared less about anything than just the fact I removed the device without asking him first, even though I'd been discussing the issue for days.
We will figure out. He'll either get another one, or something.
And I work cloud IT. I have the technical knowledge, it's just applying it here would be how.
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
You might look into D-Link cameras, there are some cameras that don't send to cloud and can be send to a PC or NAS devices on the local LAN side instead of going out to the WAN using up bandwidth.
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
@jaspolar wrote: We came to an agreement. The roommate cared less about anything than just the fact I removed the device without asking him first, even though I'd been discussing the issue for days.
Still interested to hear (a) which camera this is and (b) how the bandwidth usage was measured.
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
I was using speedtest both within Orbi and from wireless/wired devices. Orbi had been saying 440-480 for months. We thought cable provider was just jacked up.
I went and manually disabled every device within the Orbi app, and tested from a hardwired machine. Finally say 480mbs the orbi said. Manually reconnected each device, testing after. It was the camera that dropped it. All devices enabled but the camera, still 400+mbs. I would enable it, 100mbs.
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
Thanks for the explanation. I struggle to understand how a security camera could affect download speed, which is what most people care about. And the monitoring was from the hardwired pc through all this, not relying on the Orbi "self report"?
Re: Roommmates security camera consuming 75% of our bandwidth. Orbi RBR50. Any way to vlan or limit
Yeah, honestly, it's also odd that it could consume so much. Seems fairly old, my roommate didn't believe it at first either, said he had used it before with no issues. I don't know the camera. He has not mentioned anything. At the moment it's under the rug, and the camera is disabled. I'm sure we'll discuss alternatives in the future, or perhaps a new one. We're all home because if quarantine, so it's not enabled.
