Hikvision DS-2CD2332-I IP camera and dramatic increase in internet usage

D

Dave Augspurger

n3wb
Jan 1, 2016
4
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A few months ago I purchased and installed a Hikvision DS-2CD2332-I camera to monitor my driveway. I have it connected to my home network via my router and only view it on my pc and smart phones, I don't record or use any motion detection or other features. Basically, I just open the web page or app to view when I'm expecting company. Over the holidays I left the app open a lot more than normal due to guests coming & going. Now I'm getting notices of high data usage (my typical monthly use is about 200 GB but in the past 15 days or so I've used over 750 GB!) from my ISP and will be charged for excess usage.

The only thing I can think of that would have caused this much usage is this camera. Is that the likely culprit and, if so, is there anything I can do to limit it's usage of bandwidth?

Thanks!
 
Its not your camera. 750GB is ~750 HD movies worth of video. Do you backup over the internet?
 
@Dave Augspurger Welcome to the forum. Your pc in on your local network and cell phone is connected via wifi when you are home. This uses ZERO internet bandwidth. As dalepa says, something else is going on.
 
Dave Augspurger said:
Yes, I backup to Carbonite but that is ongoing. Is there software that is simple enough to use and can pinpoint the culprit?
Click to expand...
https://seriousbit.com/netbalancer
Configure in settings for online processes only. Haven't used this myself on Win 10, but worked great on Win 8.

BTW..wife has been streaming Netflix and AMZ Prime hours a day for the past two weeks of vacation.. I won't be surprised to get a nastygram from my ISP. (we don't pay for TV).

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk
 
As much as I like to complain about my internet provider, at least they have never once tried to pull this metered usage BS.
 
Yeah, that shouldn't use any internet bandwidth if you're just viewing it locally (directly from your router). Your router should be able to classify that as LAN (local area network) usage and not WAN (wide area network) bandwidth coming from your ISP....Only thing would be if you've got the camera somehow set to push the video feed to a server through the internet...Or have a port open to allow remote access over the internet and you're somehow watching it through that locally as if you were watching it from a remote location....

If you're streaming at a constant bitrate of 8 megabits per second to or from the internet, that equals 1 megabyte per second; 60MB/Minute; 3.6 GB/hour; 86 GB/day ; approx 346 GB/week.

Thus, it's certainly "possible" to use over 750 GB/month from an HD webcam streaming over the internet, so it may be worth checking your network settings to make sure you're not somehow broadcasting your cam over the internet and/or watching your feed through the internet instead of locally.

Still, chances are there's something else that is causing the excessive usage. Is your network password protected? If not, you may have neighbors connecting to your wifi and watching netflix all day. Also possible that if a computer has malware on it and stays on all the time, it could be doing some excessive downloading in the background. Lots of possible reasons.
 
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I am pretty confident the camera was the culprit. I did have it set up to access remotely using apps on a couple of smart phones and ipads. I found that my son and wife both had it open in the background on their devices and I suspect that was the cause. I must have set it up wrong initially. I'm going to reset everything and try to access it only via an html browser on my local pc and watch the bandwidth usage. I learned a lot...the hard way I'm afraid :-)
 
Dave Augspurger said:
I am pretty confident the camera was the culprit. I did have it set up to access remotely using apps on a couple of smart phones and ipads. I found that my son and wife both had it open in the background on their devices and I suspect that was the cause. I must have set it up wrong initially. I'm going to reset everything and try to access it only via an html browser on my local pc and watch the bandwidth usage. I learned a lot...the hard way I'm afraid :-)
Click to expand...
You can still use the apps locally, just use the cameras local ip address in the apps and it cant use data. Also note that by default the apps use the substream which uses little bandwidth...also if they are not actively viewing the app it will not stream data. Even if you used the external ip in the app, but you were local on your wifi, it would not use data as wxman points out....so it still may not have been the cam.
One easy way to check is to find out if what your upload usage was..the if it was the cam, then the upload should be huge too.
 
Looks like it wasn't the camera after all. I basically killed everything and started from scratch and have been tinkering for the past few months. The spike in usage was (I believe) related to a program on my kids pc called Steam (game interface). I used Glasswire to determine what application was using all the bandwidth and this Steam can uses up ridiculous amounts of data. I've put strict limits on this for now as I look for a way to throttle it or cap it. Now, I'm trying to set up my camera for viewing over the web on my iphone again and having trouble. I installed DD-WRT on my router during my whole investigation process in hopes it could help pin-point the data bandit and now that have it installed, I don't want to go back to the Asus GUI.

I know I have to forward some ports (8000, 80, & 554), just having some trouble remembering exactly what to do. I know the IP of the camera and I can get the IP of my pc. I use DD-WRT to forward the ports but do I put in the IP of the camera, pc, or leave blank? I would assume the pc. If anyone knows of a good walk through or instructions on setting this up, could you point me toward it? It's frustrating to think I had this working at one time and now I can't figure it out again! My brain must be fried from all the trouble-shooting I did (throwing darts) trying to figure all this data usage out. Thanks!
 
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