I Switched To UniFi Protect, For Gaming - Didn't See This Benefit Covered By Linus

[boon4376]

Hey All,

 

So about a year ago, I bought a nest hello doorbell cam for security purposes. It works well to capture my front-door and driveway, but I also wanted to add 2 more cams, for the whole front of my house, and another for the back yard.

 

I live in Portland, Maine - and the best internet I can get here is 100Mbps download, and only 10Mbps upload. I recently took delivery of my two additional nest cams, but then got some concerns about how much bandwidth would be required for 2 additional nest cams doing 24/7 video uploading to the cloud. I'm not sure about everyone else's internet, but when we start to use up our upload (like if someone's device is backing up photos or something), we notice a huge difference in gaming lag and ping.

 

Linus in his video mainly focused on the benefits of avoiding a subscription and the camera quality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkjD4xIhfTw)... but the subscription really doesn't bother me because it's like $12 a month. What actually bothered me was the potential that these cams would start hog my upload bandwidth, and impact my gaming experience. I do mainly FPS online gaming like Overwatch, so ping times and connection quality is a huge concern. 1/2 of online gaming is sending data back to the server.

 

I found that my single Nest Hello doorbell set to only medium quality settings, was using consistently 400kbps of upload bandwidth. If I was to add in 2 more cameras, that would increase to approximately 1200kbps of continuous never ending upload bandwidth - at not even really high-res settings. My internet gear would have to figure out what traffic to prioritize when gaming too.

 

So I started researching alternatives and realized that Linus recently did a unifi setup. I recently upgraded from a Google OnHub router to a Unifi Amplifi Alien, and it actually reduced my average ping from ~60 - 65 down to ~52 - 55 (in overwatch specifically - hardwired in both cases, obviously). So good experiences with this brand so far.  So I'm switching my whole video surveillance system over, including the doorbell, away from Nest and to Unifi Protect. I got two G4 bullet cams, the G4 doorbell, the Cloud Key Gen2 Plus, and some PoE Injectors.

 

Running and hiding ethernet cables across my home is going to be a mega pain in the butt though.

 

So the biggest benefit to me is that I can scale this solution now and in the future and not worry about the impact on gaming (or the lack of video recording if the internet goes out). I will miss the nest package delivery notifications, I don't think unifi does that. 

[Bad5ector]

Gottta love them ISPs that give you just enough upload to handle the download overhead eh?

 

So glad my ISP offers its GB service with gb up and down. My previous ISP was the same as yours 100 down only 10 up. 

 

I assume that the Unifi cams offer a way to limit when they upload to the cloud or am I missing something? Won't they still use up the bandwidth? Or do they save locally? I am a unifi house and we were looking at getting a cam / doorbell but were leaning Google since we also have a nest mini (offered by Spotify for free).

[boon4376]

Just now, Bad5ector said:

I assume that the Unifi cams offer a way to limit when they upload to the cloud or am I missing something? 

The "CloudKey" is a network video recorder - video stays local on your network, with 24/7 recording and full quality. There is a mobile app that has basically the same feature set as the Nest app, so you can stream the recordings to your phone from anywhere, even when off premise. 

[Bad5ector]

Oh, you bought the cloudkey... I wonder if I can do the same thing with my Unifi controller that I have installed on my RaspPi.