When talking to potential customers, two frequent questions are, “how much bandwidth do your cameras consume?” and “how long do they store the video?”  Before we address these questions, I think it’s important we provide a little history on how we ended up with the solution we have.

When we first started the company, we talked to numerous IT managers and one of their first concerns was around bandwidth.  They consistently said that if they were going to setup a lot of these cameras (30+), they couldn’t have them uploading video to the cloud as the consumer solutions like Nest cameras do.  To give an idea of how quickly your bandwidth might be saturated, a camera will take around 0.5 Mbps - 1 Mbps to stream video to the cloud.  If you are running 30 cameras, that’s 15 - 30 Mbps of constant data usage and 100 cameras would be 50 - 100 Mbps.  For a lot of companies, these numbers would quickly start to strain or even overload their network.

Bandwidth Consumption

So, back to the question of how much bandwidth our cameras take.  Given that we store all the video locally on the camera, we take negligible upload and download bandwidth.  It’s usually around .01 Mbps which consists of diagnostic information or some clips that need additional processing by the server.