Does gateway CPU matter at all for streaming from a 30Mbps down / 5Mbps up business cable internet package?

[AveryFreeman]

Hey,

Had a thought, figured this'd be a good place to ask -

TL;DR - does gateway performance matter at all when streaming video from a location with a connection as slow as 30/5?

I have this friend that owns a restaurant, and he streams about 50 cameras from his property (it's an outdoor restaurant - not all at once, of course, but about 30 of them do low-res 1.3mp cloud recording). He has one of those 30/5 Comcast business internet plans, unfortunately the fastest thing he can get in his area.

He got a Unifi USG v1 about 5 years ago, and I'm just wondering if how slow/fast this thing is makes a difference on a connection that slow? He can only upload at a max of 5Gbps from the place, so obviously not the best connection for streaming video *while* recording remotely, as well...

I don't really know the specs of the USG v1 but I don't imagine it's a powerhouse. Would putting something together like an amd64 running pfSense be beneficial, or would it not even matter?

I think I've got a spare Supermicro board with a Xeon 1220L-v2 and 32GB ram around here somewhere...

 

[BlueFox]

You're not going to need anything higher performance than the Unifi USG for a connection that slow. Even something as old as a WRT54GL would be enough.

 

[AveryFreeman]

You're not going to need anything higher performance than the Unifi USG for a connection that slow. Even something as old as a WRT54GL would be enough.

Lol, those WRT54Gs were some bad mfers. I used to love installing DD-WRT on ones I would find for a few bucks at Goodwill (this was like almost 10 years ago). I think my mom still uses one I gave her as an AP with a powerline adapter for her bedroom, so she can (wait for it) stream to her phone...

But that's only one server (streaming source) and one client, all on a lan. What about when you have up to ~50 streaming servers, the cameras uploading to their cloud recording IaaS?

And what if you have 2-3 clients simultaneously accessing the cameras in the form of people who work at the restaurant looking at recordings off-site? These clients are accessing and playing back recordings through both the IaaS for recordings that get uploaded due to motion detection, but also from the cameras themselves, because they record continuously to local media (microSD cards).

Does this not put any real strain on the gateway in terms of threading/switching/time sharing?

Any other strategies you think might help, like QoS, since we only have the 5Mbps upload to play with?

 

[BoredSysadmin]

your friend's issue is 5mbps upload since this is what limits him to piss poor performance video upload - 30 cameras even with a lower bitrate need of 1.3mp is still the chocking point. replacing it with a better router/firewall isn't gonna do much. he needs to change the ISP with better upload speed.

 

[LodeRunner]

your friend's issue is 5mbps upload since this is what limits him to piss poor performance video upload - 30 cameras even with a lower bitrate need of 1.3mp is still the chocking point. replacing it with a better router/firewall isn't gonna do much. he needs to change the ISP with better upload speed.

This is the correct answer. the 5 Mbps upload is the problem. The CPU of the USG won't be a problem until you're somewhere north of 500 Mbps, depending on how it's configured.