Will this increase my bandwidth consumption?
Bandwidth consumption is an important consideration when thinking about adding a new service to your property. Naturally, there are two types of bandwidth we need to consider - internet bandwidth and local network bandwidth. Typically, the problem exists with your internet bandwidth when you are trying to send data away from your property, most often when using a cloud solution.
We have built this software to be extremely flexible. There are ways we can deploy MIDL that will increase internet bandwidth consumption and there are also ways we can deploy where bandwidth consumption is not increased, or is very minimally increased. It will largely come down to what you want to achieve and the current infrastructure at your property.
As mentioned above, the issue exists when you are trying to send data from your property to another destination. Think of water moving through a pipe. If the pipe is not big enough for the amount of water flowing through, it will either burst or it will take a very long time to move the water. You can think of data flowing through pipes in this way. If the pipes at your property aren’t big enough and a back up of data occurs (which is referred to as bottlenecking), a loss of your data can occur. If the data is sent slowly, you have now sacrificed being able to view cameras and send alerts in real-time, effectively defeating the purpose of cameras.
So how do we work around bandwidth issues? For one, we can deploy completely locally and only send data to the cloud when requested. This limits that heavy and constant data transfer that exists with cloud solutions. Secondly, the way we pull your camera streams and send you data can also be adjusted. We can limit the amount of bandwidth by pulling less intensive stream types while decreasing the amount of data that needs sent by only sending metadata instead of images and videos. Each approach has its strengths, it is about finding what works best for you. We would enjoy strategizing with you as to which approach will best suit you. If you would like to have a conversation regarding this topic, just send us a message by clicking the button below.