Wifi NVR - need wifi expert

Hardware
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Hello Everyone,

Does anyone else have experience with the Reolink Wifi NVR (RLN12W) who is trying to run more then 4 Duo3 Wifi cameras on it? I have 4 Duo3 Wifi, 4 E1 Pro Wifi, and 2 Wifi doorbells. The Duos run at 16MP and all the others at 5MP. The issue is that when you connect all the
cameras, the system lags and alot of the cameras are running 30 seconds to 2 minutes behind. My cameras are 30 ft from the NVR and I have great signal. I can connect any 4 cameras and run at full quality with no issues. That tells me its not the signal because
they work fine by themselves. I even bought 3 Reolink Wifi Extenders and 2 Antenae extenders. I have full bars on all cameras and all are on the 5G connection. They all show Wifi 6 connection. I moved the NVR to multiple locations, upgraded the harddrive,
along with multiple other tests. What I think is happening is the Wifi band from the NVR is overloaded with too many data packets and it cant handle it. At this point the only way it works is to put half on the NVR and half on my Wifi. But not I am dragging
down my wifi speeds. I also added a seperate Wifi access point just for the cameras to seperate it from my house network. I have been working with Reolink support but they still have not come up with a solution. My solution is to buy another NVR and split
the cameras between the 2. Reolink will not help with the cost so I am out another $200 for the NVR and $300 for another 16tb hard drive. Kind of stupid when they advertise that is can handle it. Any ideas out there?
I am by no means a Wifi expert but I learned alot in this journey.

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Not likely. You have described a lightly loaded WiFi network. I have none of the hardware you describe, but I do have 93 WiFi devices including nine WiFi cameras., I also have 16 Ethernet devices.

I did have problems about a year ago where WiFi devices would drop offline intermittently or new devices would refuse to connect. The ISP (Verizon) sent me a new router, and the problems went away for a few days. The ISP tech support was, as usual, clueless. They just sent me a third router.

From your description, my money would be on the router. Can you unplug a few cameras, reboot the router (important) and the problems go away? Double my bet on the router.

Are you using the router provided by the ISP? It would be from the low bidder. Sufficient for the typical home with a few computers and maybe one or two streams at the same time. The problem with the ISP supplied router is the amount of memory inside for the routing tables, buffering and network management. Since it is RAM, rebooting erases all of this. If a router’s RAM is insufficient, it may struggle with performance, resulting in dropped connections, slow response times, or failed packet processing.

In my case, the router started crapping out at 50-60 devices. I bit the bullet and replaced my router with a commercial router. I chose the TP-Link Omada line. (Omada is the budget version of Ubiquiti).

Here is my final configuration:
ER-7206 Router
OC-200 Omada Hardware Controller *
EAP-610 Access Point (2)
EAP-615-Wall Access Point (2)
TL-SG1210P 8 Port Gigabit PoE Switch
TL-SG1005P 5 Port Gigabit PoE Switch (2)
TL-POE10R PoE Splitter

TP-Link does make a cheaper router in the Omada line, but it has the same low-RAM problem as the off-the-shelf routers. The 7206 has been replaced with the ER7406.

The OC200 controller is optional because you can either manage each Omada device individually or use their cfree loud service. You can also use their controller software on a computer, like the Raspberry Pi, but I bought the controller because it was far cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.

The POE splitter isn’t used, but I bought it anyway for possible future use.

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4 16mp cameras
6 5mp cameras

Try changing duos to 5mp and see if that improves things

Also, is issue lag in live view only.
Are you recording 24/7 or just motion?

If recording is OK maybe you can try another solution for live viewing.

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@stevemann Thank you for helping. I have about 80 wifi devices connected to my smart house as well. I run 5 Deco BE16000 units. All are Wifi 7 capable. I can run all the cameras on the Wifi but I do sacrifice my Wifi speeds at that time. According to the Router app, I am over 150MBS upload at that point. I have the same issue with the Wifi NVR or my Wifi network, with all of them connected to either one, reduced performance. Split them and its ok. I really want everything on the NVR so the rest of my Wifi device can run smoothly.

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Thank you for the help. I am trying to run all cameras at full quality. The lag is on the NVR screen live viewing or on my home assistant. I am recording 24/7.

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Is lag the same when viewing single camera vs multiple camera. This unit has limit to number of simultaneous live streams. It’s hard to tell but look like 2 main stream is max possible with 10 substream.

Do you have some method to see “viewing” devices on NVR? Is it possible some clients are keeping open connection to stream and creating lag?

You can try connecting camera to go2rtc and using go2rtc stream to nvr. I wouldn’t recommend this on pi but if your HA hardware is decent it may help. I wouldn’t do this if recording is priority since
HA reboot would affect recording.

My concern was writes to HDD and network.

LAN interface on unit is 100mbps. Can it handle the cameras and simultaneously output a video stream at high resolution. This isn’t a WiFi problem but really a hardware (NVR) problem.

I also don’t know what it takes to write that data to disk and how they may affect NVR function.

I think your, get a second NVR thought may be correct. A NUC running frigate may also work well but will require software management and could be a pain for you.

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@tmjpugh Still learning here so bear with me. With the Wifi NVR, I can connect all of the cameras to the NVR without the LAN connected because it creates its own Wifi network. I can then view all the cameras on the NVR with an HDMI cable again with the LAN not connected. The LAN only gets the data off of the NVR and on to my local network so I can pull it into something like Home assistant. Correct?

If thats the case, I am not sure the LAN is the issue. That’s why I think its a WIFI Band width issue. I can connect half on the NVR wifi and half on the house wifi and the NVR can process them all and keep them all in sync. Thats why I dont think its an NVR processing or hardware issue. It can handle 10 feeds no problem. I just cant put them all on the same Wifi access point.

Please let me know if my thinking is wrong here. I dont mean to argue with anyone, trying to understand.

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Aren’t the Duo cameras 2 cameras each? Mine are in the NVR and in HA.
If that’s the case you have 14 cameras feeding in…

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Why so slow? 300Mbps is typical. I have CAT5 all over my house and get 300Mbps rates, which is what I pay my ISP for. I formerly had Gigabit from the ISP but experienced no change when reducing my data rate to save money.

My Home Assistant server is an Intel NUC i3. I do use the Frigate add-on for my nine WiFi cameras. I do see about a 250ms delay when I am viewing live using VNC, and about 500ms on Frigate.

I also record some cameras 24/7 using Frigate. Frigate saves videos to the media folder and I have my media storage on a Samba Share (a 2Tb folder on my NAS).

Still putting my money on the router.

Multiple cameras can efficiently share bandwidth because they do not transmit frames simultaneously. Instead, Each camera sends a 1–2 ms frame approximately 30 times per second.

With 15 cameras, each sending 30 fps at 1–2 ms per frame, total transmission time would be 500–900 ms per second, leaving 100 ms for other devices, switches for example.

15fps is sufficient for security cameras and you would barely notice the difference in live viewing,

A high-performance router (with QoS) helps balance traffic efficiently.

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If it is a 100Mbs NIC, you only get 100Mbs.

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I have couple of years older NVR Reolink and it’s 100 on the cable I know.
But that one is POE so they expect the bulk to come in thru there.

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Yes. That is correct…

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Yeah. Thats a problem. I assume what your saying is if the NIC is limited to 100mbs on the LAN port that it is also limited to 100mbs for the wifi as well?

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What router specs are you looking for @steveman. Happy to dig them up. I think my routers should be more then capable.

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RAM

I mentioned that my first Omada Router (Omada correctly calls it a Gateway) also crapped out around 60 clients (the router doesn’t care if it’s WiFi or Ethernet clients, they all need RAM in the router).

The first router had 256kB of DRAM and the 7206 has 512kB. Here is a snapshot of my router load:

omada
omada961Ă—264 28 KB

My switches are unmanaged, so they don’t show in this snapshot. I can’t imagine how a managed switch would be useful in a flat network.

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If you tested like this and it works then yes. WiFi issue.

My statement presumed you connected NVR to router and used router WiFi to connect cameras. If NVR is providing WiFi connection my information is irrelevant.

But since you using NVR WiFi, maybe it has poor throughput and can only handle so many connections. Your solution seems to work for this as well

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Yes if the device is using that port to connect to the rest of the network then that is limiting available bandwidth between the devices connected to it and said network.

You want to make sure that you are using at least a full 1Gbps port for backbone.

I run my hikvision cameras set to 30 frames at a max bitrate of 6144 and iframe of 60 at a resolution of 2688*1520 into my Synolgy, 3 cameras are plugged into a POE 5 port netgear switch that then plugs into a dedicated port on my main non POE switch, last camera is using ethernet into a POE injector then into a mesh node that then connects back to my main router via 5GHz backbone.

I don’t have issues at this time since I have the bandwidth this way and I have a clear image on all of them whilst also letting me see the live feed without issues when not at home via the app through my vpn back into the network.

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Keep in mind that WiFi spectrum (i.e. a channel) is is a finite, shared, physical resource across all the APs in your home, so if your router and/or NVR allow you to set the channel, you might want to make them different to prevent further congestion. It sounds as if you have already done this, which is why splitting the cameras across both WiFis is working better than using a single channel.

Be wary of commenters suggesting that video streaming is “efficient” — it almost certainly is not — multiple cameras can’t coordinate their transmits and statistically will cause congestion as more are added. One of the main rationales behind development of WiFi 6 was to improve spectrum efficiency for congested networks streaming lots of video. A single channel of WiFi 5 could handle maybe 5-10 2k (3MP) simul streams (mine maxes out at 4; I live in a downtown city); WiFi 6 should be able to handle 20-50. With 4x16MP and 6x5MP you might be bumping on these limits.

Does the Reolink NVR permit you to change the width of the channel? If so, trying widening to 80 or even 160MHz. If not, does it permit you to create separate networks using different channels? If so, try putting a few cameras on each channel. If not, perhaps you can peel off a few cameras to a dedicated AP (on a different channel) connected to one of the NVR’s 100Mbps Ethernet ports to see if that improves performance. Barring that, you always have the option of reducing the resolution or framerate of the streams until they fit comfortably in the Reolink WiFi channel.

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You cannot change channel width or create seperate networks on different channels. I tried putting half of the 5g network and half on the 2.4 but that failed as well. Looks like 2 NVRs or access points is the key on this one. Thank you everyone for the help. There is very limited data out there on the limits of one wifi channel. Its funny how the advertize up to 16 gig on wifi 7. I get its total across everything but obviously not true.

Thanks again

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Here is my question. If my router can do 3888 mbps on the 5g channel, why am i having issues with 200 mbps of camera data…shouldnt i have a ton of room for that? I need help understanding this concept.

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