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IP camera in the boondocks

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Mark Anderton

New Around Here
I have a customer who bought a house in the middle of nowhere in rural Virginia. It was quickly obvious that there was little to no cell service on the property which is not a surprise since the place is about 15 miles off the main highway served by cell towers. Because you could occasionally get one ort two bars, I decided to try a whole house cell amplifier. I bought an Amazboost unit on Amazon that touted 5000 sq. ft. coverage. I installed it and, lo and behold 3-4 bars inside and outside the house. I tried streaming video to my phone and video phone calls etc. and all worked without dropouts or buffering. Initial problem solved. Then I needed to make internet available to whatever device might need it, so I started looking for hotspots with router capability and suddenly realized I had some time ago purchased a Teltonika RUT950 cell phone WIFI hotspot/router that I had a failback function which I planned to use for my business but never got around to installing. I set it up as a hotspot and it hooked up to the cell signal from the booster and like magic I had wifi throughout the house. Initial cost for all of this was around $600, but if I could get a hardwired service provider, which I can't and probably never will, that would cost about $100/ month or more. No recurring cost with this rig assuming the customer has a cell plan with unlimited data.

First question: This hotspot will be left on all the time and the house is unoccupied most of the time. How much data does it consume when it is idle?

Second question: The reason it will stay on is that I want to install IP cameras that I will port forward so the customer can view the property when it's closed up. Does an IP camera only consume data when a user attaches and is actively viewing or is it sending data all the time? I assume not, but I can't find any good answer in my searches.

Thanks,
Mark
 
Depends on the cameras and apps. Many of them upload to their cloud.

Also depends on what other devices are connected to. TVs, streaming boxes, etc. They may get updates and/or new programming uploaded (constantly).

If the data is truly unlimited, it won't matter either way.
 
Second question: The reason it will stay on is that I want to install IP cameras that I will port forward so the customer can view the property when it's closed up. Does an IP camera only consume data when a user attaches and is actively viewing or is it sending data all the time?

Depends on the platform, so look carefully.

LTE gets expensive very quickly...

I recommend having something that can locally store the video, and the end-user/customer can log in as needed.
 
I think you can set this to take and upload snaps every X seconds:
they make managing a fleet remotely pretty easy...just keep it under 10 devices and it's free.
local storage is probably the best way though - maybe you can stream through/store in their cloud as well as to a local solution/natively??
 
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