Cellular Backup lag after Wi-Fi goes down?

Products Ring Alarm
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Last night at 11:13 pm I received a notification “Base Station REPORTED OFFLINE.”

I kind of freaked out, because I was not at the site, I was 30 minutes away.

I checked my wi-fi provider website to see if there were any outages in the area. Nope, all good.

I remembered that Ring has a cellular backup system when it goes down, IF you are subscribed to Ring Protect Plus. I’m not “subscribed” yet, but on the free trial.

I opened the app, and I couldn’t do or see anything on my 2 ring cameras. Everything seemed offline /unavailable.

I couldn’t find any numbers to call to ask about what was happening. I just hoped that when I went to check the next day, no one had broken in.

At 11:31pm, I received another notification “Cellular Backup RING ALARM IS RUNNING ON CELLULAR BACKUP…”

That’s 18 minutes after the wi-fi went down. I hope it was active immediately, and simply just taking 18 minutes to send me a notification. Thieves could do a lot of damage in 18 minutes if the wi-fi went down and there was no cellular backup during that time. The AT&T coverage in my house is great, so I don’t think there’s any issues with cellular network availability.

After I received the cellular backup notification, it was several minutes before I was able to view any footage from my cameras. From what I could tell, they were still recording during the blackout phase? Is that correct?

The system went back to wi-fi right before midnight, when I received a notification “Base Station CONNECTION WAS RESTORED.”

So I would just like some clarification about the apparent lag time between the wi-fi connection being lost, and the cellular data system backup kicking in. How long does that take? Are the cameras still recording during that time, and uploading once they are connected to cellular or wifi again? Thanks.

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Hi @safeT. Thanks for reaching out to the Community for this concern! When it comes to logs of information on when your devices were offline/in cellular backup/online, our support team can look at this more in-depth for you, specifically on the Ring Alarm. Please note that the Ring cameras do not use the cellular backup, as the cellular backup is only for the Base Station. Therefore, if you were still seeing activity and recordings during this time that you were unsure of events happening after the fact, your phone may have had a hard time connecting to the Ring app at this time. This does seem to be the situation, as you said you got notifications seemingly late as well.

In all, our support team can verify this for you for peace of mind, so please give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here. We’re taking additional steps to protect our team and help reduce the spread of COVID-19, so this has resulted in longer than normal wait times. If you are outside of the US, please read our response to COVID-19 here to see how to contact support. Feel free to come back and report how this goes, neighbor! :slight_smile:

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Hi neighbors! Losing network connection to your Base Station should lead to Cellular Backup, as long as you are subscribed to a Protect Plus plan. Similar to your wifi, your Cellular Backup will require a sufficient connection to operate, which is a given in most locations. Ensuring for a dependable network connection is best. Check out our Help Center article about Z-Wave for tips on optimizing connection. To learn more about what happens when your Base Station goes offline, visit our Help Center article here as well.

Reaching out to our support team is always a great way to check your Base Station further, and reset it if needed. Please give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here. If you are outside of the US, please visit here to see how to contact support.