But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?
But do you have a viable alternative in your back pocket?
In my experience pretty much all IP cameras phone home in some way at some point, so yeah, you are best off putting them on a separate VLAN and routing appropriately.
The only brand I’ve had a good experience with is Reolink. I don’t think the quality is appreciably different than a brand like Hikvision and the firmware and support is vastly superior.
Edit: Some good info on using Reolink cameras with Frigate. I use Blue Iris but would vastly prefer OSS.
I live in rural California. We only just this year are able to pick up a faint LTE signal. I think it might get us a very unstable 1-2 Mbps if we hold the phone just right. We have no cable, DSL or other land-based options and because of the topography can’t pick up the local wireless provider, which is very expensive anyway - like $175/month for 50/5
So without Starlink our only options are crappy regular satellite providers like Hughesnet which impose very low quotas - 10 GB monthly for day time usage - and have insane latency.
It bugs the shit out of me I have to give money to that fuckwit but without it we live in the dark ages.
Residential electricity isn’t cheap
This is a point many folks don’t take into account. My average per Kwh cost right now is $0.41 (yes, California, yay). So it costs me almost $400 per year just to have some older hardware running 24x7
Yeah, Nebula is quite good. Really like Curiosity Stream too… I subscribe to both.
But alas, most channels I follow are Youtube only and not likely to change :(