Connecting Several wireless IP cameras to the PC through WIFI

[Boldtrust]

Hello people. I have a problem that needs an urgent attention. I have been working on how to connect several wireless cameras through wifi and preview them on the same Computer.

The cameras are up to 48 in number and they are going to be very far apart so I'm planing to use Wifi repeaters to extend signals from the wifi router to the cameras.

The site is somehow complex to run cables because the cables would have to pass through at least four buildings to get to the DVR/NVR. So I don't want that option and my client doesn't like it either. I would like to know if connecting them to a wifi router (wireless connection) and then connecting a computer to the network through which I want to preview the videos would work. I would also like to know if there is a recommended special software I can install on the computer. Or is it possible for me to get a wireless 48 NVR? Please I really need this urgently.

 

[fenderman]

Hello people. I have a problem that needs an urgent attention. I have been working on how to connect several wireless cameras through wifi and preview them on the same Computer.

The cameras are up to 48 in number and they are going to be very far apart so I'm planing to use Wifi repeaters to extend signals from the wifi router to the cameras.

The site is somehow complex to run cables because the cables would have to pass through at least four buildings to get to the DVR/NVR. So I don't want that option and my client doesn't like it either. I would like to know if connecting them to a wifi router (wireless connection) and then connecting a computer to the network through which I want to preview the videos would work. I would also like to know if there is a recommended special software I can install on the computer. Or is it possible for me to get a wireless 48 NVR? Please I really need this urgently.

Welcome to the forum..its clear that you have never installed cameras before. Trying to manage 48 cameras on wifi will be a total disaster...get someone with experience to help...urgency + inexperience= chaos.

 

[Boldtrust]

Welcome to the forum..its clear that you have never installed cameras before. Trying to manage 48 cameras on wifi will be a total disaster...get someone with experience to help...urgency + inexperience= chaos.

Thank you so much for replying, fenderman. It is true I haven't managed such a large number before but I am not new
to CCTV installation either. I just need a suggestion on whether to implement a wired type or go ahead with the wireless.

Please advise, if it were you, what will you do? Just a hint and I promise, I can handle it.

 

[nayr]

48 WiFi Cameras


Most people are lucky to get 2 cameras on Wifi before it's completely trashed the airwaves and everything Wifi just grinds to a halt..

PoE Cameras, run 48 hardwired runs back to a 48 port PoE switch.. then your going to need 2 NVR's to split the load and handle that many cameras.

 

[Boldtrust]

You make a huge point there. So, should I use the wired system? Or should I separate the into a group of 8 cameras and manage them with one wireless 8 channels NVR to each group? will there be an interference of some sort? Thanks for your attention again.

 

[fenderman]

remember that you dont need to homerun all the cables back to the NVR...thats the beauty of network cameras...

 

[nayr]

forget entirely about wifi.. if you cannot run wires in this environment, you need to abandon this gig before you end up with one pissed off customer whom flushed a ton of money down the shitter..

put a NVR in each building if you need to distribute the load and simplify things..

cameras that are recording over the network, need a wired network cable.. Wifi cannot guarantee throughput or connectivity, they drop feeds from outside interference and cause interference with eachother.. they do not scale past a couple cameras and are designed exclusively as Webcameras, not security cameras.

 

[badmannen]

Seems like a good start for you would sit down with pen and paper and draw the schematics of your network to start with. Then figure out what bandwidth you need as a bare minimum. Seems to me that you should split the workload a bit there to make it a bit easier on the servers or Nvrs or whatever solution you will end up going for

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[Boldtrust]

Yes, I thought about that and makes sense. Thank you very much. But I might be coming back with more questions. Perhaps if you were around my country, we can implement the project together. Where do you live please? *Talking to fenderman*

 

[Boldtrust]

Seems like a good start for you would sit down with pen and paper and draw the schematics of your network to start with. Then figure out what bandwidth you need as a bare minimum. Seems to me that you should split the workload a bit there to make it a bit easier on the servers or Nvrs or whatever solution you will end up going for

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Thank you. But I think the wireless option is somehow fading away since the load might be too heavy on the wireless medium. Or do you have a better suggestion? I'd be delighted to hear it.

 

[nayr]

Your going to be using alot of bandwidth, even on wired.. you need to calculate it out, you'll be at ~480Mbit or 60MB/s with 4MP Cameras and most NVR's can only handle a couple hundred Mbit max..

then you have storage requirements for that much data.. so on and such forth.. Need to figure out how your splitting the loads, segmenting the network, and locations and then spec out cameras and video recorders while designing a network capable of handling a scale of this size.

This is a big job, requiring you do to a ton of work to end up with a half way decent system

 

[Boldtrust]

Your going to be using alot of bandwidth, even on wired.. you need to calculate it out, you'll be at ~480Mbit or 60MB/s with 4MP Cameras and most NVR's can only handle a couple hundred Mbit max..

then you have storage requirements for that much data.. so on and such forth..

This is a big job, requiring you do to a ton of work to end up with a half way decent system

Even on wired? My plan is to connect about four/five cameras in a building to hub/switch and then run a cable from the hub/switch to the hub in the next building which will in turn carry four to six cameras and so on. Is this not possible too? Or do I need special hardware/configurations for this? Waiting for your reply please.

 

[badmannen]

The point is that you need to segment your solution heavily. The point with motion detection, intrusion detection and anything else you can imagine is so you don't need to manually have to sit with two eyes in front of a wall off screens and manually monitor every single camera. So what is the point in collecting all at one place continously? You just need to be able to reach a specific feed or recording remotely when or after something happened.

Sent from my One Plus X using tapatalk

 

[badmannen]

Build it up with a minimum of one server or Nvr per building physically as a minimum as a start. Then work your way from there to figure out your solution

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[Boldtrust]

The point is that you need to segment your solution heavily. The point with motion detection, intrusion detection and anything else you can imagine is so you don't need to manually have to sit with two eyes in front of a wall off screens and manually monitor every single camera. So what is the point in collecting all at one place continously? You just need to be able to reach a specific feed or recording remotely when or after something happened.

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Great point! I love it. But my plan to use such a continuous collection of the cameras in the network also involves monitoring them using special software like SECURITY MONITORING PRO (Or a better one) to monitor the cameras and configure them whether to record on motion detection or not. The software has the ability to configure for each camera. Is that obtainable? *I believe placing an NVR in each building might be expensive*. The computer on which the software will be installed will be on the network of course, and it will have very good hardware specifications as well.

 

[Masejoer]

I agree with wired.

Wireless IS possible, but you'll need many higher speed wireless access points, and for higher reliability, consumer models won't do. For wireless, you would need multiple AP's at each location to talk to a handful of cameras each, on separate frequencies, and then additional wireless APs, acting as clients, to beam each building's cameras back to a central location. Big directional antennas could help beam each building to a central location with lower interference. You'd be looking at thousands of dollars in access points alone - over $10k for enterprise-grade equipment. You would be saturating all available non-overlapping frequencies between 2.4GHz AND 5GHz and still not be as reliable, or have the performance of wired.

When I installed professionally over 10 years ago, I think we only installed wireless in three jobs over the years, at three different clients. One was on a pole at an apartment complex, one almost 1000ft away at a construction yard, and one was on a building at the other side of a parking lot. Wireless rarely makes sense.

For months before we wired up our house with CAT6 post-winter, we had 7 access points connecting 4 rooms to one another using cheaper consumer 1300Mbit connections (some connected at closer to 800Mbit). Throughput was 40MB/sec (320Mbps) with a "1300mbit" link between two APs. PCs connected to each AP with wires - the wireless was dedicated for AP-AP links. It gets much larger, more expensive, and less reliable with a lot of wireless clients sharing the bandwidth.

I agree that it would likely be best to keep each building separate. If you don't want to run wires outside, but still manage or monitor from one location, you can connect the buildings to one another wirelessly. Don't trust the external wireless connections for performance or reliability - interference is easy to introduce or experience. You still need power at each camera - wires WILL exist whether you go wifi or wired. Custom solar+battery power sources aren't typically worthwhile.

Not a cheap project at all. I hope your quotes are realistic. Without experience with large deployments, you could get yourself into trouble with insufficient funds.

 

[Boldtrust]

I agree with wired.

Wireless IS possible, but you'll need many higher speed wireless access points, and for higher reliability, consumer models won't do. For wireless, you would need multiple AP's at each location to talk to a handful of cameras each, on separate frequencies, and then additional wireless APs, acting as clients, to beam each building's cameras back to a central location. Big directional antennas could help beam each building to a central location with lower interference. You'd be looking at thousands of dollars in access points alone - over $10k for enterprise-grade equipment. You would be saturating all available non-overlapping frequencies between 2.4GHz AND 5GHz and still not be as reliable, or have the performance of wired.

When I installed professionally over 10 years ago, I think we only installed wireless in three jobs over the years, at three different clients. One was on a pole at an apartment complex, one almost 1000ft away at a construction yard, and one was on a building at the other side of a parking lot. Wireless rarely makes sense.

For months before we wired up our house with CAT6 post-winter, we had 7 access points connecting 4 rooms to one another using cheaper consumer 1300Mbit connections (some connected at closer to 800Mbit). Throughput was 40MB/sec (320Mbps) with a "1300mbit" link between two APs. PCs connected to each AP with wires - the wireless was dedicated for AP-AP links. It gets much larger, more expensive, and less reliable with a lot of wireless clients sharing the bandwidth.

I agree that it would likely be best to keep each building separate. If you don't want to run wires outside, but still manage or monitor from one location, you can connect the buildings to one another wirelessly. Don't trust the external wireless connections for performance or reliability - interference is easy to introduce or experience. You still need power at each camera - wires WILL exist whether you go wifi or wired. Custom solar+battery power sources aren't typically worthwhile.

Not a cheap project at all. I hope your quotes are realistic. Without experience with large deployments, you could get yourself into trouble with insufficient funds.

Thank you. I really understand why the wireless option is not rliable and I think it's too expensive to implement. I have opted for the wired IP cameras. However, my plan is to have it segmented as follows: Each building will have a collection of about 8 cameras connected to a hub/switch. Then the network will be extended to the next building with the same setup and number of cameras in it. Which means the system will consist of a continuous network with a switch located in each building and cameras connected to it; and then extended to the next building. A central Computer will act as a server with a software capable of previewing at least 32 cameras at a time.The software will take care of recording, configuration and management of the IP cameras. Can this plan work? Or must I place an NVR in each segment of the network? (that is, in each building, which will be more costly to implement). Once again, thanks for your attention. I'll be expecting your answer.

 

[nayr]

sounds good, I would add a few points: connect buildings with Fiber Optic uplinks so they are electrically isolated.. a lightning hit or some industrial equipment failure wont leave the building.. PoE switches with SPF Uplink ports would do the job.

whats your recording and storage requirements? a big beefy central computer capable of handling your load with the appropriate software licenses (i dont think Ive seen BI scale this large) may cost more than just putting an 8 port PoE NVR in each building.. Dahua NVR's can cluster so they act as one big NVR from the software (SmartPSS) perspective.. this gives you alot of redundancy, as no building will actually rely on another being connected, which would make uplinking buildings with point to point wireless much more reasonable.. because recording wont rely on those uplinks, just your monitoring station.

 

[Boldtrust]

sounds good, I would add a few points: connect buildings with Fiber Optic uplinks so they are electrically isolated.. a lightning hit or some industrial equipment failure wont leave the building.. PoE switches with SPF Uplink ports would do the job.

whats your recording and storage requirements? a big beefy central computer capable of handling your load with the appropriate software licenses (i dont think Ive seen BI scale this large) may cost more than just putting an 8 port PoE NVR in each building.. Dahua NVR's can cluster so they act as one big NVR from the software (SmartPSS) perspective.. this gives you alot of redundancy, as no building will actually rely on another being connected, which would make uplinking buildings with point to point wireless much more reasonable.. because recording wont rely on those uplinks, just your monitoring station.

Now I think I'm making progress. Your suggestion is highly considerable. My target was to reduce cost though. However, I'd still like to know of that option is implementable. (That is, putting switches in each building instead of the NVRs and then connecting them together) and managing the cameras from a central server. The software I'm proposing to use is something like IP Cameras Pro. It can preview up to 32 cameras at a time. My storage plan will be arount 8TB at a time. The cameras will only record on motion detection.

 

[bp2008]

My target was to reduce cost though. However, I'd still like to know of that option is implementable. (That is, putting switches in each building instead of the NVRs and then connecting them together) and managing the cameras from a central server.

A gigabit network can handle the streaming. The only question is whether or not your software and server will handle it. I would not trust Blue Iris to handle 40+ modern cameras no matter what server you install it on, because Blue Iris is designed to always decode incoming video and that is just too much work when you are talking about hundreds of megapixels. Other software like exacqVision Professional may handle it, but it will cost a stupid amount of money for licensing.

Nayr gave you very good advice. Put an 8 or 16 port NVR in each building, and link buildings with fiber optics so you don't have to worry about power surges between them.

The software I'm proposing to use is something like IP Cameras Pro.

I can't find anything by that name.