Telstra Smart Home - Camera Issues

[Colin75]

I am writing to share my experience with Telstra Smart Home. I am a Telstra employee and an early adaptor of the products we sell, I was one of the first to receive my Telstra Smart Home Watch and Monitor kit. Set up was easy and straight forward with no issues. After a few weeks of use I did notice that my camera feed's (I have 3) were slow to load or did not load at all. All my other devices in the home were working fine, so did not believe I had an issue with my NBN service. Logged a service call with Telstra Platinum support who assisted as best they could, the fault was escalated to level 2/3 support and calls back and forth they were trying to recreate the fault within the test centre. The thought was maybe my Hub was faulty, but none of the sensors had problems communicating, before we went down the replacement option, I performed a full factory reset with the support of Telstra Platinum and while it seems to be ok for a few hours, it returned to the same slow/no loading issue I was experiencing. During this whole process my home internet was performing perfectly, no issues at all, I did have some thoughts that maybe I should try another modem, maybe that was the issue? I did some research and the modem I was supplied with my Belong 100mbps NBN service ran 802.11n WiFi, which is great for the standard user and most (like myself) have no issues. I borrowed a Telstra Gateway Max from a mate who had a spare and set it up at home, these modems run the latest WiFi 802.11ac technology and have dual bands to select from when setting up your network. I put the Telstra Smart home on the 2.4 band and everything else in the house on the 5G band and wow what a difference it makes. The camera feed is instant and has worked without fault. Problem solved! So if you are looking at getting Telstra Smart home, make sure your modem has dual band capability with WiFi 802.11ac tech.

[Mat_Gibbs]

Great advice! thanks for sharing your story, am sure it will help others. 

[Yastiandrie]

Hi Colin,

I was the consultant that gave you the call to discuss the problems you were having. Glad you finally worked it out and a useful bit of information to know. It was certainly a doozy

[Jupiter]

I just wish that I could get the camera to connect to the Smart Home System.

The camera is great (both daylight and night vision) and I can see the feed using 3rd party software, but it has always been an Oops, when trying to add it to the system from day 1.

Waiting for the Level 2 Techs to have a look to see what is going wrong with the system.

[KrisMoore]

Hi 

I have the same issue with adding an outdoor camera.......any advice?

[Jupiter]

Not yet. Waiting for a call back.

[Yastiandrie]

Try plugging the camera into an ethernet port on the modem, checking to make sure the modem has picked up on the camera, then re-running through the add device section of the app

[NTayeh]

Hi @Jupiter,

Can you please provide me some further details regarding your camera?

Happy to assist you getting it online.

Regards,

Nathan 

[NTayeh]

Hi @KrisMoore,

Happy to asist you getting your camera up and running.  

Can you tell me a bit more about your camera issue? 

Regards,

Nathan

[Jupiter]

Hi Nathan,

I've got an Indoor Camera, it's connected to my home network, but won't connect to the Smart Home System. It just keeps coming up with Oops, something went wrong.  Have tried connecting wirelessly, via Ethernet. Nothing works.

The camera, however works fine. I can see the feed using other software (from both within my home network and now externally), that I got to check it after it wouldn't connect.

On the upside, this morning I was finally able to get an Automation added to the system. I can now get notified when my Front Door opens.

[NTayeh · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jupiter,

Sounds like we need to do some trouble shooting together over the phone, lets discuss this further in a private message.  Can you please PM me and will work on fixing the camera?

Regards,

Nathan

[Mels15]

I too am having problems with my outdoor camera.  Our circuit breaker tripped the other day and since then the camera has had "communication failure".  If I look at the app I can see what the camera is seeing right now but it is not triggering any of our automations such as turning on our light or recording when movement is detected.  This is the second time we have had problems with it after losing power.

[WalPJones]

Hi there, is there any easy way to disable a smart home camera, temporarily, say just while you have people over for a BBQ for eg

[oscarthegrouch]

My camera image would not load on the portal in Chrome but would on the phone app, this seemed to be related to Flash player but I could not get it to work in Chrome, however it works using the Edge browser in Windows 10.

[Yastiandrie]

@waipjones you can disable the motion sensor via settings > my devices > manage device

@oscarthegrouch chrome has an inbuilt version of flash with its own set of settings. You may have to whitelist the smart home portal in the chrome settings in the browser

[macajeff]

I'm very disappointed with Telstra Smart Home so far. The outdoor camera's are far too sensitive (mine is set to low). I woke up to 30 videos of a plant lightly moving in the breeze.
And only a maximum of 30 video recordings in 24 hours is very poor. I got the system for peace of mind when I'm away from home. It's pointless turning it on now as within an hour my usage is used up and I'm bombarded with texts and emails to alert me that a plant has infiltrated my property.

[RGTelstra]

Having all sorts of issues with app and camera. 9 out 10 it takes over 40 sec to load app and minutes to load the camera image. In fact the camera image often does not load at all. Very frustrating when not at home and the sensor is triggered only to see nothing except the camera trying to load an image. The product is obviously not performing correctly. Any ideas?