What we check
Site cameras that go offline, burn through an allowance in a fortnight, or cannot be reached from the office. These are the seven things we check, in the order we check them, and what each one usually turns out to be.
The pattern
This is not a write-up of one job. It is the pattern we keep seeing, so it is written as the checklist we actually work through rather than as somebody else’s story.
CCTV goes wrong differently from everything else on a site. A phone that stops working gets reported within a minute, because somebody is holding it. A camera that stops working gets reported weeks later, when you go looking for footage of the thing you needed it for. By then the recording you wanted does not exist.
It is also split across two suppliers who rarely speak. A security company installs and maintains the cameras. Somebody else provides the connection. Each one can reasonably say their part is working, and the fault lives in the join between them. That is the gap this checklist is designed to close.
The checklist
The order matters. Several of these change the answer to the ones below them, so working through it in sequence saves rolling back on a decision later.
The outcome
In most cases it lands on one of three things, and none of them is the cameras. Either the recording configuration and the data allowance do not match each other, or the SIM is tied to a network that is weak at that particular spot, or the recorder has no address anything can connect back to and remote viewing was never going to work.
The fixes follow from that: change what is being recorded and sent, move to a multi-network SIM so the site uses whichever network is actually strongest, or put the recorder on a fixed IP so it can be reached. Often two of the three. All of them are cheaper than a second engineer visit to a site that turns out not to have a camera fault at all.
What we would push back on is buying a bigger allowance before anyone has looked at the recording settings. That fixes the symptom for a month and leaves the cause in place.
Questions
Because cameras upload continuously if they are set to, and video is large. Continuous recording at a handful of cameras can run through an allowance built for a laptop in days. Switching to motion-triggered clips, or recording locally and only sending events off site, changes the figure enormously.
Almost always carrier-grade NAT. A standard mobile SIM lets the recorder reach out to the internet but does not give it an address anything can connect back to. A fixed IP SIM or a private APN gives it a reachable address, which is usually the whole fix.
No. If you only ever view footage through the manufacturer’s cloud service, the recorder reaches out and a standard SIM is fine. You need a fixed IP when something has to connect in: remote viewing direct to the recorder, a maintenance company supporting it, or an integration that expects a known address.
On a remote or unmanned site, usually yes. Those are the places where one network is marginal, and a camera that goes quiet has nobody standing next to it to notice. A multi-network SIM uses whichever network is strongest and moves if that one degrades.
We would rather test first. Signal at the recorder, upload capability and the actual recording configuration decide what you need, and guessing any of the three is how people end up with an allowance that is either wasted or gone by the middle of the month.
No. We supply and support the connectivity and work alongside whoever installs and maintains the CCTV. That split is normal, and the gap between the two is exactly where these faults tend to live.
Tell us where the recorder sits and what it is set to record. We will work through this list with you before anybody sells you a bigger allowance.
