Find out how much network bandwidth your cameras consume — LAN ingress, NVR throughput, and WAN uplink — before you buy the switches and routers.
Planning a network for an IP camera system requires knowing three bandwidth figures: LAN ingress (total camera traffic hitting the switch), NVR ingestion throughput (what the recorder must handle), and WAN uplink (for remote viewing and cloud relay). This calculator derives all three from your camera count, resolution, codec, FPS, and motion settings. It also warns when you're approaching switch saturation or NVR port limits, and accounts for radio type overhead if some cameras are on Wi-Fi, 4G/5G, or mesh networks.
A 4MP camera on H.265 at 20 FPS typically uses 1.5–3 Mbps in average scenes. In high-motion environments it can reach 4–6 Mbps. H.265+ reduces this by 40–60%. H.264 at the same settings uses roughly 2× more bandwidth.
NVR throughput is the total bitrate the recorder must ingest simultaneously from all cameras. A standard embedded NVR has a 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) network port. You should not exceed 70% of this (700 Mbps) to allow headroom for motion spikes. This calculator warns you when you approach that limit.
Remote viewing typically uses the sub-stream, which is about 10–15% of the main stream bitrate. For 16 cameras at 2 Mbps each, you need approximately 3–5 Mbps of upload bandwidth for smooth remote access. This calculator estimates WAN requirements based on your sub-stream ratio.
The video bitrate is the same, but Wi-Fi cameras add 10–15% overhead due to packet retransmissions, acknowledgements, and connection re-establishment. 4G/5G cameras add 20–25% overhead due to variable latency and buffering. This affects storage requirements more than raw network bandwidth.
For 32 × 4MP H.265 cameras at 2 Mbps each, you need about 64 Mbps on the camera VLAN — a standard 1 GbE switch handles this easily. If cameras are 4K (8MP) at 4–6 Mbps, total traffic reaches 128–192 Mbps, still within 1 GbE but approaching 20% port utilisation. Use a managed switch with QoS for any deployment over 16 cameras.
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