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My internet speed has been sporadically slow again the last week or so.
It's probably an ISP problem.
But I wondered if the 2 Wyze cams I had connected to my network were involved, either by using so much bandwidth that less is available for my laptop, or maybe due to my ISP throttling my speed after noticing the increase in traffic from the cams.
Right now, the cams are both pointed outside. Each time they detect motion, they upload a short clip to the cloud. I have the detection windows set to ignore the street, but still get a bunch of spurious clips of bushes moving in the wind and cars driving by. When cars drive by at night, turning the corner, their headlamps shine into my yard, which triggers the events, even if the cars themselves don't.
On my router (a Netgear WNDR3400), I had enabled the "guest network" for the cam connections. Devices attached to the guest network can't interact with devices on the main network, or with each other. That way, if someone manages to hack into the cameras, they shouldn't be able to get to my main network and my laptop.
My router shows traffic logs, but only in terms of traffic per day/week/month. It's not broken down by source, so I can't currently see how much traffic is being used by the cams, nor what IP addresses they communicate with. (I became curious about the latter after reading this thread: WyzeCam sending data to servers other than AWS. Per the thread responses, it doesn't seem to be an issue anymore, but it wouldn't hurt to double check. I seriously wonder how the Wyzecam company can make money off of the cameras when they are so inexpensive (under $30) and when they also provide free cloud storage space for each camera, along with all the bandwidth used in uploading & viewing the clips on the cloud.)
Today in the router settings I disabled the guest network for a while to disconnect the cameras, to see if doing that improved my internet speed. It didn't. (I could have instead unplugged the cameras, but I figured that disabling the network would be simpler. Oh, was I wrong.)
I decided to power cycle the modem & router. I used to do that every night, but since getting the cams, I've been leaving them turned on all the time. Maybe they just needed to be rebooted to fix the internet speed problem.
But after the power cycle, my laptop and phone were no longer able to connect to my main wi-fi network.
Connecting my laptop to the router via a LAN cable worked ok. I verified that my main wi-fi network was still enabled, with the same name and password. I turned everything off and on a few times, but it still wasn't working. The phone was showing "Authentication problem" when trying to connect. I made it forget the network, and re-entered the wi-fi password, and it still didn't work.
Finally, I re-enabled the guest network. Whaddayaknow: Then my laptop and phone were able to connect to wi-fi again, even though they aren't using the guest network. So there must be some bug in the router software.
Now that the guest network is back up, the cams are still failing to reconnect, even after power cycling them. So, that's probably ANOTHER bug in the router software. Update: power cycling the modem & router again fixed that problem.
Earlier today, I'd considered getting a different router which would allow me to track the traffic used by each attached device (can any of you recommendation a router that supports that?). Now I'm even more inclined to do so.
It's probably an ISP problem.
But I wondered if the 2 Wyze cams I had connected to my network were involved, either by using so much bandwidth that less is available for my laptop, or maybe due to my ISP throttling my speed after noticing the increase in traffic from the cams.
Right now, the cams are both pointed outside. Each time they detect motion, they upload a short clip to the cloud. I have the detection windows set to ignore the street, but still get a bunch of spurious clips of bushes moving in the wind and cars driving by. When cars drive by at night, turning the corner, their headlamps shine into my yard, which triggers the events, even if the cars themselves don't.
On my router (a Netgear WNDR3400), I had enabled the "guest network" for the cam connections. Devices attached to the guest network can't interact with devices on the main network, or with each other. That way, if someone manages to hack into the cameras, they shouldn't be able to get to my main network and my laptop.
My router shows traffic logs, but only in terms of traffic per day/week/month. It's not broken down by source, so I can't currently see how much traffic is being used by the cams, nor what IP addresses they communicate with. (I became curious about the latter after reading this thread: WyzeCam sending data to servers other than AWS. Per the thread responses, it doesn't seem to be an issue anymore, but it wouldn't hurt to double check. I seriously wonder how the Wyzecam company can make money off of the cameras when they are so inexpensive (under $30) and when they also provide free cloud storage space for each camera, along with all the bandwidth used in uploading & viewing the clips on the cloud.)
Today in the router settings I disabled the guest network for a while to disconnect the cameras, to see if doing that improved my internet speed. It didn't. (I could have instead unplugged the cameras, but I figured that disabling the network would be simpler. Oh, was I wrong.)
I decided to power cycle the modem & router. I used to do that every night, but since getting the cams, I've been leaving them turned on all the time. Maybe they just needed to be rebooted to fix the internet speed problem.
But after the power cycle, my laptop and phone were no longer able to connect to my main wi-fi network.
Connecting my laptop to the router via a LAN cable worked ok. I verified that my main wi-fi network was still enabled, with the same name and password. I turned everything off and on a few times, but it still wasn't working. The phone was showing "Authentication problem" when trying to connect. I made it forget the network, and re-entered the wi-fi password, and it still didn't work.
Finally, I re-enabled the guest network. Whaddayaknow: Then my laptop and phone were able to connect to wi-fi again, even though they aren't using the guest network. So there must be some bug in the router software.
Now that the guest network is back up, the cams are still failing to reconnect, even after power cycling them. So, that's probably ANOTHER bug in the router software. Update: power cycling the modem & router again fixed that problem.
Earlier today, I'd considered getting a different router which would allow me to track the traffic used by each attached device (can any of you recommendation a router that supports that?). Now I'm even more inclined to do so.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 09:11 am (UTC)From:Outside of that I've connected nothing but the Pods so I'm not sure what to suggest. OP played with a Nest for a while (and had it working) but I have no idea what settings he used, though they couldn't have been too involved since he can't get into the router without me.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 03:38 pm (UTC)From:https://www.wirelesshack.org/routers-that-can-monitor-data-bandwidth-usage.html
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 01:46 am (UTC)From: