My partner bought three of these a couple of years ago. He didn't look closely enough at the actual costs and services, so Verizon has taken us for a ride, in addition to probably the arlo fees plus the costs of the cams at over $300 each (I am also weaning us off of Verizon for all other services for the same reason).
I called arlo yesterday and was told since the cams was bought through Verizon that was our only option for cellular service. After speaking with them a couple minutes more, they told me I could check with AT&T. AT&T has its own service, complete with monitoring, which is not what we need. When hooked up, the cams communicate through Verizon's cellular service and we get event notifications. We can then look up the events on a PC or smart phone and save as needed. As far as I can tell, all three cams together never even used a meg of data with Verizon yet they're charging for full phone service.
At this point, we're looking at keeping the events on the sim cards and switching them out, doing everything manually, with no notifications.
Currently, I have switched our land lines to Ooma and am trying out USMobile on one of our cell phones and our tablet. USMobile has been great so far with the cell phone and tablet, but they say they don't do security cams. I'm trying to understand why no cams, and why with arlo we can only use Verizon, because it seems to me all the arlo cams need is a cellular service provider.
Is there a way to utilize the cams, with notifications, using a different cellular service? Or is there a way to bypass the need for cellular service by somehow converting or joining with our cable service (we're using Comcast)? Or is there another way I'm not thinking of?
Thank you for your help.
Kim
I called arlo yesterday and was told since the cams was bought through Verizon that was our only option for cellular service. After speaking with them a couple minutes more, they told me I could check with AT&T. AT&T has its own service, complete with monitoring, which is not what we need. When hooked up, the cams communicate through Verizon's cellular service and we get event notifications. We can then look up the events on a PC or smart phone and save as needed. As far as I can tell, all three cams together never even used a meg of data with Verizon yet they're charging for full phone service.
At this point, we're looking at keeping the events on the sim cards and switching them out, doing everything manually, with no notifications.
Currently, I have switched our land lines to Ooma and am trying out USMobile on one of our cell phones and our tablet. USMobile has been great so far with the cell phone and tablet, but they say they don't do security cams. I'm trying to understand why no cams, and why with arlo we can only use Verizon, because it seems to me all the arlo cams need is a cellular service provider.
Is there a way to utilize the cams, with notifications, using a different cellular service? Or is there a way to bypass the need for cellular service by somehow converting or joining with our cable service (we're using Comcast)? Or is there another way I'm not thinking of?
Thank you for your help.
Kim
