Foscam Wifi 25 camera Nightmare!

[BlueWire Digital]

I have a customer that bought 25 Foscam wifi cameras, Engenius APs and repeaters, and a NAS about a year and a half ago. They have asked me to make the system work. I would love to rip out the entire system and start over BUT, one they have money invested thats just over a year old, their budget cannot handle a full swap out, and this is on a 5 acre property with multiple building thru-out and many different power sources (circuits) (ethernet over power will not work) (will need to be a true wifi only setup).

With 25 cams on the main network, the network just cannot handle that kind of traffic and will crash and drop cams.

I have 2 thoughts but don't want to spend the time and money to test them if someone here knows a better solution. (Please don't tell me the equipment is junk and to just swap it out, that is not an option for them at this time)

Option 1: To get a better router and create a VLAN dedicated to the cameras.

Option 2: Find a NVR that will talk with Foscam and have the camera network on its NIC, also adds a central location for recording and remote viewing.

Cameras:
Foscam FI9831P
Foscam R2 1080P
Foscam FI9805P

Network Access Points and Repeaters:
(1) Engenius ENH220EXT
(3) Engenius ENS202EXT

NAS:
Synology BC115J 1300

 

[alastairstevenson]

With 25 cams on the main network, the network just cannot handle that kind of traffic and will crash and drop cams.

Do we take it that the network does not have a Gigabit core switch?
A Gigabit link or port should handle the aggregate traffic OK - 25 cameras at, say 4Mbps each is only 100Mbps.
The Engenius ENH220EXT has Gigabit ports, the Engenius ENS202EXT has 10/100Mbps ports.

How does the traffic aggregate up?
If it's all to the router, is it Gigabit? And even if so, a switch would be better core.
Does the traffic all go to the NAS, and what speed of link iis it connected with?

create a VLAN dedicated to the cameras.

That's logical separation - it won't add to traffic capacity unless it's based on a more capable device.

 

[mat200]

Welcome BlueWire Digital,

Looking forward to hearing what works out.

Thanks.

 

[bp2008]

A nightmare indeed. It would be helpful if you mapped out the equipment. Literally draw a diagram on top of a recent aerial photo of the area and show where everything is and how it is connected. Including the wifi channels being used. Without that, all we can give is general advice.

I'm going to assume all of the cameras are connecting by wifi to local repeaters that are wirelessly repeating over longer distances back to a single central access point (probably all on the same wifi channel?). That is the problem more than anything else. Egregious abuse of wifi.

First, I would try to get the system limping by reducing the bit rates on all the cameras. Try 0.5 Mbps (half a megabit, or 500 Kbps). Now this is going to make the video look pretty bad, but hopefully make things much more stable. You can reduce the frame rates to compensate somewhat for the lower bit rates. Fewer frames will make each frame look better because each one gets more data. I'd push the frame rates as low as 3 or 5 FPS.

After that, there are a few things that can be done to improve the network capacity.

I'd start with replacing the wireless links between buildings. If you used a pair of Ubiquiti Nanostation Loco M5 for each link between buildings, this would clear up a great deal of 2.4 GHz airtime for the cameras. However it is important to note that a clear line of sight between the radios is required. Trees or vehicles or even glass windows in the path will strongly weaken their performance. Each Ubiquiti radio can have its output power, radio channel, and channel width tuned manually for efficient use of the spectrum, so you could run quite a few 5GHz links in the same physical area without much interference between them.

Afterward, if there is the budget for it, wire all connections you possibly can. Every radio you take off the air is one less source of interference for the others. But since you said this needs to be a true wifi only setup, I suspect that option will be met with much resistance.

 

[bp2008]

Lastly, if you can get this system stable with decent video quality, then for an NVR I would recommend a refurbished modern i5 computer running Blue Iris. Hopefully these guys haven't already bought synology surveillance station licenses for that low-end NAS.