WiFi Camera Frustration

[tgh203]

Hello,

I purchased 6 IPM-722S cameras and was really looking forward to getting them all set up and working. I invested in everything I *thought* I needed to develop a stable, working wireless camera setup, including:

- Dedicated HP EliteDesk 800 workstation with 5 TB storage to act as the server
- Dedicated Apple Airport Express router using separate channels and network topology
- 4 Ubiquiti AP repeaters to provide good wifi coverage across the property
- Hundreds of feet of Cat6 cable to provide a solid connection of the AP repeaters to the router
- 2 Netgear AP1200 WiFi Range extenders (tried as an alternative to the Ubiquiti repeaters when they were not working)

After several weeks of trial and error testing, troubleshooting, configuring, talking to Ubiquiti tech support and Ubiquiti forms, I am ready to give up and install Cat6 through the attic to all cameras. While I can get them to connect over wifi initially, they usually lose the signal within a few hours, and when they do have a signal it's very choppy with lots of lost frames. The Ubiquiti control panel does show some interference/packet loss at times, so I have tried various other channels, power output, etc., but nothing helps. I should mention that I am running another Wifi network on a different channel as our primary network, so I'm sure there is some interference going on. But I would think using separate channels (1,6,11) would minimize that problem. There are no other networks in range.

My question for this forum - is anyone actually using more than 1-2 wifi cameras over a larger property? If so, can you please describe your network setup? Are you using repeaters, etc? At this moment I'm very discouraged, and can't understand how anyone could actually get these things working in a consistent manner. But at the same time, I'm thinking, what's the point of having a 720p wifi camera if it can't be used to capture reliable high def video over a wifi network? So if I could hear that others are having success, I might feel more determined to keep trying.

Thanks for any input you can provide.

- Tom

[jabber]

I have a property with 2 buildings and 2 cameras on each building. I tried to link them using a wireless remote bridge all recording back to an NVR4108 at the main building. My experience was similar to yours in that the cameras would record for a few hours then would crash the wireless bridge. I tried both Engenius and Netgear hardware with similar results, setting changes for overflow and buffering made a difference but I could not get it 100% stable. I struggled with it for 2 weeks and ended up running a wire between buildings.

These cameras transmit a large amount of data and it seems transmitting for a period of time overruns the buffers or exceeds the thresholds of the AP's. A simpler WIFI network without the range extenders or high-end hardware like Cisco might fix the problem but running wires would be a guaranteed solution. Best of luck.

[tgh203]

Thanks so much for your reply jabber. Very interesting to read your similar experience.

Again, I'm just scratching my head on this. These products are WiFi cameras, designed to do one thing - send video over WiFi. But apparently they don't actually do that reliably.

"You had one job!"

[Jordan77]

I would try and hard wired them to a wireless router and the use the router as a bridge back to your main connection. I have 4 cameras running on one wireless network. Of course i am using a netgear x4s router.