My not so techie friend called me up one day asking me to help him to configure a few IP camera’s in his newly renovated house.
I drove to his house and found that the camera was already mounted to his freshly installed plaster ceiling by his contractor. I asked him what’s the big problem with the camera as normally it’s quite straightforward. He told me that he was not sure how to configure the camera wirelessly. Well, my answer was you can’t really configure a camera to wirelessly to talk your wifi network without first joining the camera to your wifi network. Actually there is a way to do it but it involves pressing the WPS (Wireless Protected Setup) on the camera but on the router side you also need WPS to be enabled. Anyway, short story is I did not use WPS because I prefer manual setup because you can used fixed IP address. As the IP camera was already mounted up at the ceiling, I had to take my ladder and pull a physical network cable (CAT5) from the router to the IP Camera and configure it.
I managed to configure all 3 IP cameras but 1 unit which was placed at his backyard could not connect properly, I double checked and found that his wifi signal cannot reach his backyard. Nothing much I could do at this point but to advise him to either get a better wireless router or invest in cheap wireless repeaters which will extend the wifi signal in his house.
The takeaway from this episode is to configure all IP cameras before mounting it up to the ceiling. The other thing is I found that wireless IP camera’s lags when you view its interface via the web browser, compared to wired it is much smoother. Therefore, if possible IP camera’s should be connected via physical cables rather than using wireless connection.
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| Wireless Camera - To configure before mounting |