RLN12W - Limitation on number of cameras

[Elijah Pokrop]

Hello Everyone,

Does anyone else have experience with this Wifi NVR who is trying to run more then 4 Duo3 Wifi cameras on it? I have 4 Duo3 Wifi, 4 E1 Pro Wifi, and 2 Wifi doorbells. The Duos run at 16MP and all the others at 5MP. The issue is that when you connect all the cameras, the system lags and alot of the cameras are running 30 seconds to 2 minutes behind. My cameras are 30 ft from the NVR and I have great signal. I can connect any 4 cameras and run at full quality with no issues. That tells me its not the signal because they work fine by themselves. I even bought 3 Reolink Wifi Extenders and 2 Antenae extenders. I have full bars on all cameras and all are on the 5G connection. They all show Wifi 6 connection. I moved the NVR to multiple locations, upgraded the harddrive, along with multiple other tests. What I think is happening is the Wifi band from the NVR is overloaded with too many data packets and it cant handle it. At this point the only way it works is to put half on the NVR and half on my Wifi. But not I am dragging down my wifi speeds. I also added a seperate Wifi access point just for the cameras to seperate it from my house network. I have been working with Reolink support but they still have not come up with a solution. My solution is to buy another NVR and split the cameras between the 2. Reolink will not help with the cost so I am out another $200 for the NVR and $300 for another 16tb hard drive. Kind of stupid when they advertise that is can handle it. Any ideas out there? I am by no means a Wifi expert but I learned alot in this journey.

[joseph_1979]

@elijah-pokrop Maybe you hit a limit.

I assume your RLN12W WAN port is connected to a router. If this is the case I suggest you to run half of your cameras on your home WIFI and add them to the RLN12W. This means that the data flows from camera to router (WIFI) and from router to RLN12W (cable). Note that we cannot run all the cams in this way as we will hit the 100Mbps bandwidth of the eth port on the RLN12W. I cannot understand why in 2025 they still implement 100M eth port. It should be 1G. Same cost.

See if the lagging dissappears. If not then it is a resource issue on the RLN12W.

[Chopstix]

@elijah-pokrop Where exactly are you seeing the lag?... playback? monitoring? Can you confirm if the recording themselves have frame loss?

The RLN12W (on paper) should have enough bandwidth to record clean. Playback via the LAN port is another issue as @joseph_1979 mentioned it is only 100mb so if you are playing back multiple streams, it could be an issue.