Is an IP Camera MOBILE?

The short answer? NO!

You generally won't be toting your IP Camera into Barnes And Noble, glomming onto their wireless connection, and broadcasting your reading-self.  But I suppose you could, perhaps.

But for medium stays like an overnighter, weekend, etc. it could be practical to set up and deploy an IP camera.  The problem is, each time you move, you'll need to reconfigure the camera, your router, even your DDNS provider and potentially even your domain provider. And since it can take hours to propagate a domain change, in some cases, this just isn't practical.

But let's say you live on a boat, and move around a lot. But at the same time, you tend to stay in one place for a week, or even a month or two. And you'd like to have a camera on the boat [1]. In that case you have some options. One, you can set up for the presiding wireless service, get the IP and port, and mail or text it off to your audience. But unless you can make changes to the wireless router, that can't happen. Read on.

You probably won't have access to the wireless router's port-forward or DNS settings, so you really can't configure your camera to respond over the WAN. Remember, the router has to know where to route requests to see your camera, and on a public net, and they are not likely to let you broadcast off of port 80 (the default for HTTP).

This is potentially a show-stopper. But maybe you can *buddy-up* to the Wireless LAN provider and get him to sneak a port-forward in for you! And a FIXED IP for your camera.  If you visit the harbour annually, perhaps the person would be willing to just leave the setting there- and even *time-share* it so others can use it when you're not there.

What if you have a domain name for your camera? Well that's a bit stickier, but even that can be somewhat mobile. You redirect your DDNS to your current IP/Port, and you should be online again in seconds. Read more about that in my post on IP Camera Domains.

If the router-admin grants you access, well, I guess you'd owe him AT LEAST a beer for that! Or two.

Happy mobility!

[1] this is actually a WONDERFUL idea- a PTZ camera (read about camera types in an earlier post), hi up on a mast, would potentially have splendid panoramic views of the harbour, waters, boats and more.