Home surveillance systems – Wired vs. Wireless
Every home should be equipped with a surveillance system nowadays. It has become essential to be able to monitor your home when you are there or away. When considering a surveillance system, the first question that typically comes to mind is… Should I go Wired or Wireless? The easy route is to go wireless but, in this case, easy is not the best.
Wireless Systems
Installing a wireless system will get you from start to finish quite quickly. Setup typically consists of screwing camera hardware at your desired area for monitoring, connecting cameras to your Wi-Fi network and downloading an app on your phone. From there, you’ll be able to monitor live and recorded events from your mobile device. Recorded data is stored in the cloud that would depend on storage subscription options with the manufacturer. Seems straight forward, doesn’t it? Well, despite it seeming simple, there are some major drawbacks that should be considered. The integrity of wireless system is completely dependent on how strong your Wi-Fi signal is. If there is ever an outage in your Wi-Fi network, that means your camera system is down too.
If that is not bad enough, you are also physically tethered to the power supply; meaning that either you must replenish batteries often or put the cameras on a charge often. Either way, you would have to physically get to your camera location each time leaving the system subsequently down for that period of time. To us, this doesn’t quite measure up to the ease of the setup as mentioned before. Another downside you should be aware of is the delay in the monitoring signal. Since wireless is dependent on Wi-Fi, the events that occur in real time will not be alerted to you in real time. There is typically a 5-10 second delay in an event being relayed to your mobile device. For us, that time is the crucial difference of an intruder being at your bedside and you being alerted. To go more into the security aspect, wireless systems are more vulnerable to hacks whereas it is not possible to hack into a wired system.
So, a more crucial question to ask is… how important is my home’s surveillance to me?
Wired Systems
We at Premiere are advocates of wired systems. They are more reliable in that the systems are always powered on; even in the event of an outage. They are not dependent on Wi-Fi or batteries, and they don’t need to be charged. Most importantly, there is no delay on what you’re monitoring on your phone and what is happening in real time. You will learn though, that installation is more involved and more hardware is required. Aside from the cameras itself, you will also need a Network Video Recorder (NVR) to record events, and a hard drive to store the recorded events. The most challenging part of installation is wiring each camera to a central location in your home where the NVR and hard drive is located. Rest assured that we can locate the optimal locations for cameras, install and wire them to the ideal spot for your hardware. Aside from that, we can program settings for your wired systems to adjust perimeters, sensitivity, recording schedules and more. A wired system offers robust features that can optimize your monitoring experience. You don’t want to be notified of any false events like cats running by or trees blowing in the wind. A wired system gives you enough parameters to set so that only important events trigger a notification.
If you decide that a wired system is right for you, give us a call and you will find that having us install and program a surveillance system for you is in fact the easier route to go. All it takes is a call… We’ll do the rest.
Rom Pragasa Premiere A/V Integration Las Vegas, NV USA
