I just have a PoE switch. It's actually easier to run ethernet than power, especially outside. Clogging up your WiFi spectrum with megabits of constant video seems like a terrible idea.
> Clogging up your WiFi spectrum with megabits of constant video seems like a terrible idea.
Yes, that's the thing I like about the Arlo system I have now: it has its own wifi network so, even if it's using spectrum, it's probably not affecting my LAN throughput.
> It's actually easier to run ethernet than power, especially outside.
This is true, but the house where I live already has power available everywhere I might need a camera. The thing I don't like about running new cables is the need to drill holes through exterior walls.
If the current setup can't, plugging the cameras and the NVR into a separate switch and none of that traffic will go near the rest of your LAN.
Wifi on the other hand, there's really no (practical) segregation to speak of - the spectrum has limited bandwidth, it doesn't matter if it's a different SSID / wifi network, it'll affect your Wifi!
I don't get why people don't get that part. What they mean by "Up to 1234 Mbps" on the box is "1234 Mbps shared". It's a giant wire occupying 1/4 mile around the AP, whereas, in wired Ethernet it's 1Gbps per link per direction.
A GbE switch with wire-rate transfer guarantee can handle 1Gbps traffic between arbitrary combination of ports. All the camera traffic coming from port 9 to 16 going to NVR on port 7 have no impact to traffic between upstream router on port 26 and your PCs on port 3 and 5. That cannot happen with Wi-Fi because everything is inherently on the same shared port 1(sometimes literally); each 4Mbps incoming is 4Mbps of download speed taken from your laptop. Double if destination is also on Wi-Fi.
This might be fine if there's just few cameras, but it's something to be aware of.
If you live in a sufficiently low density area (rural or suburban with large lots) you can put the two networks on different channels and they won’t meaningfully interfere with each order.
The chances are, if you live somewhere like that, somewhere that actually has a low noise floor for RF, then you likely also have a lot of space to cover with your wifi - and that means sacrificing range (via additional access points) for the second network..
For me: Wifi is great! But, whenever it's practical, I avoid it... Everything with it is a tradeoff!
> Yes, that's the thing I like about the Arlo system I have now: it has its own wifi network so, even if it's using spectrum, it's probably not affecting my LAN throughput.
Wifi6 is changing a lot of this, but generally speaking Wifi performance is not optimized for media style traffic. Media traffic does best with low jitter (variance of latency) as this tends to keep buffer sizes low and avoids dropping frames. Wifi is not very good at low jitter, and though Wifi6 is a lot better than previous Wifi standards, it's still much harder to keep jitter low on Wifi than it is on a LAN. On top of that, as the sibling commenter says, even if you have a separate Wifi network, spectrum doesn't segment that neatly. Wireless traffic uses multiplexing methods (there are several and if you're interested, the methods are fascinating [1]) to roughly use the same spectrum. These multiplexing methods obviously need to do more work the more traffic there is on the spectrum.
If you can route your media traffic through LAN do it. Obviously as you say, running new cable is a lot of work so it's understandable why you use Wifi. But LAN is just so much better that if you have the time/money (doing it yourself/hiring someone) to do it, I highly recommend you do.
