Does a lack of bandwidth cause devices to drop offline

Potential-Monke

I'm arguing with colleagues at work over something. We support IoT security devices, and there are minimum requirements to support each device. One of the lads reckonds a lack of bandwidth won't cause a device to go offline. I'd be of the opposite thinking.

For example, let's say that they have 4 of our devices, and require, for argument's sake, 0.5Mbps DL and UL per device, so they need 2Mbps UL/DL without taking anything else into account to ensure they have enough bandwidth (live cloud storage, thus the upload requirement).

The same customer has loads of other smart devices, tvs, 3 consoles, SONOS, competitor devices, etc. Basically, it's a very smart home with literally everything connected to Wi-Fi, and he's having connectivity issues. We can see that most of his devices from us are getting well below the minimum required, and are dropping.

I believe this is because the bandwidth is not available, so it loses connection. My colleague says this is not the case, lack of bandwidth won't cause a device to drop offline. Who's right? I'm not qualified enough, only know my stuff through usage, and I would be up to date enough on Wi-Fi and connectivity in general, I just thought that devices would drop if not enough bandwidth was available to keep them online.

The high horse brigade

How long is a piece of string.

What you may need is proper QOS, prioritisation and/or bandwidth shaping on the router but to do this you need a guaranteed minimum bandwidth and a decent router. Any residential connection is contended ie shared with other users so minimum bandwidth at peak hours is not guaranteed.

Potential-Monke

I understand that, and asking our customer to do QoS is the same as asking them to perform open heart surgery. Even thought everything is App based and requires a decent connection, they somehow still think all network issues are our issues. But I wanted to go back to my colleague and say 'You're wrong! Lack of bandwidth can drop devices offline'. Not all the time, but I want to disprove his 'Bandwidth won't cause it to drop offline' argument.

The high horse brigade

Potential-Monke wrote: »

I understand that, and asking our customer to do QoS is the same as asking them to perform open heart surgery. Even thought everything is App based and requires a decent connection, they somehow still think all network issues are our issues. But I wanted to go back to my colleague and say 'You're wrong! Lack of bandwidth can drop devices offline'. Not all the time, but I want to disprove his 'Bandwidth won't cause it to drop offline' argument.

Why don't you supply them a router, then you'd have full control. A decent Mikrotik costing 60 quid would give you all you need.

I'm in the security industry and we would never ever consider WiFi, let alone share a network or connection with other services.

Potential-Monke

The high horse brigade wrote: »

Why don't you supply them a router, then you'd have full control. A decent Mikrotik costing 60 quid would give you all you need.

I'm in the security industry and we would never ever consider WiFi, let alone share a network or connection with other services.

We just support the product, network and equipment is outside of our control. Our biggest issue is explaining to people that it's self monitored and relies on their connection. It's end to end encryption, we're not too worried about the security. Most IoT things need to work on Wi-Fi, otherwise you're basically eliminating the entire market except for people who know Ethernet is better for everything, which is a small %.

niallb

Potential-Monke wrote: »

I... that they have 4 of our devices, and require, for argument's sake, 0.5Mbps DL and UL per device, so they need 2Mbps UL/DL without taking anything else into account...

That so is not simple addition. It's very unlikely that the devices will be maxing their requirements simultaneously, but that's just nit picking.
Also if they're cameras streaming to an offsite NVR, they may well be using it all.

Is it your own devices which are going offline, or is the customer blaming you for other devices going offline? Can you by any chance put in your own wireless access point just for your own devices and connect to a port on their router?

If there are older 802.11bg devices connecting to a shared wireless network,
they may be restricting speeds available to more modern devices which could look like they're dropping off - this would be most visible with a smart TV.

It sounds like there are a lot of devices on the network anyway.
Are the (multiple) Smart TVs wireless too? Get those cabled and it'll make a big difference if internal bandwidth is actually your problem.

Have you got an accurate count -if there's a few phones and tablets involved as well as competitor IoT devices it's likely to be closer to 30 devices than 20.
At that stage you may not be getting great results from "the cheapest router anywhere in the world that could be sourced in bulk by your ISP at the time".

Putting a higher grade router in place that can tell you what's going on as suggested by @the\ high\ horse\ brigade is the easiest way to get good information.

By any chance is it the Sonos devices which are dropping? If anyone has tried to sort out the problems by adding multiple wifi networks to the building to try to spread the load this can make Sonos devices unworkable. They all need to be attached to the same network to function as expected in groups as destinations.

Potential-Monke

I'll clarify further. We have Product A, which is a self-monitored, App based IoT camera (think Nest/Canary/Arlo etc). There are minimum network requirements per device. We have no control over which ISP or Network Equipment is used, just that it needs to have 1Mbps DL & UL per device. Main device can connect via Ethernet, other 2 are Wi-Fi only. They detect motion, start recording to a central cloud based server in the US (vast majority of customers are US based), phone gets a notification, etc.

One of the customers is refusing to do a speed test, but has said he has loads of devices connected with no issues so it's not his network. Aside from the fact I'm pushing to get the speed test results along with details of exactly what is connecting, my colleague said it won't matter as bandwidth won't be the cause of the device dropping offline. So it's our product dropping on the customers network, and is allegedly the only problem device (again, seriously doubt that, but we have to take them at their word).

I personally believe the amount of connected devices are booting our product off because of lack of bandwidth, my colleague says that cannot happen as lack of bandwidth, unless it drops to 0.0000001Mbps, will not cause our product to drop offline (christ, it's hard to do this without identifying the product!). I believe he's wrong. I completely understand there are multiple different possibilities, but I more wanted to disprove his blanket 'Bandwidth won't cause drops' statement, as I think it will.

So it could be any router from any ISP in any part of the world (we support US, EU, UK and Canada). But our requirements are basic and don't eliminate any network or equipment really, aside from hotspots and enterprise/work networks.

The high horse brigade

I'm afraid I'm kinda with your mate, during low bandwidth times your traffic would get queued on the router but most likely not dropped unless ping times got huge but the customer is saying they've no issue with other devices.

Potential-Monke

Thank you. I was hoping I was somewhat right, but that'll do!