Data usage by IP camera

I have a holiday home in Germany that I want to monitor by IP camera. I've got everything working and tested it - all works fine.
However, the net connection is kindly provided by a neighbour via wifi using a repeater. We pay him an annual lump sum to use it while we are in our holiday home, and all has been fine. What I fear is that if I leave the network running and connected to the IP camera while we are not there, it will continually use bandwidth and impact on my neighbour's bandwidth.

These chinese IP cams have a proxy IP address service. I presume that doesn't mean that the data stream is routed through a chinese server, it's just a lookup service to match the WAN to the LAN addresses?

If anyone know the answers (or even grasps what I am on about!) I'd appreciate feedback.

I could solve it by getting my own web access, but line rental and broadband in Germany would cost around £700/yr, which is expensive overkill for the time we spend there. The current arrangement suits both parties, but I want to avoid causing any problems for my kind neighbour.

Ok, are you aware of the IoT botnet which brought down Dyn the other weeK That was using chinese webcams http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/24/chinese_firm...

Not the ones you use are they?

Firstly, have you changed the defaults to prevent yours being used a part of a botnet?

Secondly, what sort of monitoring are you doing? 24*7 live streaming? You could reduce your uploads to a few photos a day to reduce the bandwidth. Or perhaps use movement sensing to alert you via email?

Or could you just record locally and not use the internet at all while you're away, or some combination?

What speed connection do the neighbours have?

Also are the wifi repeaters stable enough that they never go down?

Have the neighbours experienced any issues previously? If not it's probably fine.

I only look at the webcam feed occasionally for a minute or two, by logging into it on my mobile using a dedicated app. The account with the Chinese server has unique login to me.
The speed available in the German house various from 8-40Mb/s down, 2-8Mb/s up. It all seems to work pretty well.
Since we came to the arrangement with the neighbours I have tried to keep everything very low-key and trouble-free, to avoid them changing their minds.

If they have an unlimited broadband package then no worries.

If they have a usage limit - the key is knowing how big it is, and then watching your stream for an hour would probably use 0.5GB to 1GB, or at 2 minutes a day you'd use that in 30 days. Variations will depend on the quality it streams at and the assumption video is only served when you are logged into the cameras server.

I believe it is unlimited data. My worry was in using too much bandwidth even while not looking at the feed.

If the IP camera behaves as most do, then they only use bandwidth (upload mainly) when someone is viewing the camera feed, i.e. it is streaming from the camera directly.

Some cameras send periodic snapshots to an external site, or can be set up to detect movement and send an email, but the data volume from that should be pretty insignificant.

Also the quality of the video stream for IP cameras generally means 0.5 Mbps to 2 Mbps is used when streaming, so by what you've said the connection should not be saturating, and if worried you might do so, you can drop the quality of the live stream usually.

As someone who ran a camera watching fish in garden for a couple of years, it might be worth making sure someone local knows how to turn off/on the device, i.e. they can sometimes crash

The camera I have in a similar situation, records a video file when there is movement.

I keep the files on a Raspberry Pi and can download them as I want. Fortunately a broadband service is much cheaper in the UK.

I can also monitor temperatures remotely, start the central heating, and have remote access to the burglar alarm system.

I'm not monitoring for security, so I'm not using the motion recording function, although I might try it for fun.
The remote control of heating is appealing, but too expensive at the moment.

We leave the heating on at a very low level to avoid having the pipes freeze in the cold German winte, but if the heating fails (it used to often before we got it properly fixed) I had an idea for a cheapo solution; I put a digital thermometer where the camera can see it. If I see the temperature is too low we can ring up our local heating engineer who nips round to restart it.