One of the advantages of having today’s DVRs vs the older time lapse VCRs for recording your security camera footage is the ability to connect the DVR to your network. By doing so, you have just opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Many of todays modern DVRs have a built in web server that would allow you to view your cameras remotely from any internet browser, anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. Some also have sophisticated monitoring software that allows you to monitor your security cameras from multiple locations at the same time. For example, you may have a surveillance system installed in your business, and in your home, and with monitoring software, you could connect to both at the same time. All of this great technology comes at a price. That price is called bandwidth. Gone are the days of the old AOL dial up service that provided 33kbps – 56kbps bandwidth. Today’s typical needs are now in the 3mbps -5mbps and often higher. The most demanding bandwidth hogs on the internet that I can think of are videos.  You may think of videos as what you watch on www.youtube.com but a huge amount of bandwidth is used by security camera videos that are streamed from millions of security cameras over the internet every minute of every day. As the quality of today’s security cameras increase, the size of the video file being streamed also increases. A high resolution video stream from a single security camera may use up 500kbps or more bandwidth, so it is not hard to imagine a 16 camera surveillance system requiring upwards of 8mbps to stream high quality video over the internet.