As a Ring Doorbell owner, you might have run into the connection where it takes too long to answer a connection to the doorbell. Someone walks up to your door and hits the button. You answer the notification on your app, and by the time you finally connect to the camera, the person is gone.
Don’t worry, as you aren’t alone. Many have experienced this problem and as long as you aren’t experiencing any other issues and the doorbell eventually does connect with working video, we should be able to solve it right here.
It really comes down to a few causes to cover. Anything beyond this and you might want to reach out to Ring to see if there is something wrong with your specific unit. So let’s dive in as this is an easy one.
- The quality and positioning of your router. You will want to make sure that you have a strong connection to the doorbell. Make sure that the app shows your doorbell as having a good or better connection to the router. If not, you will want to figure out how far the router is from the doorbell. Typically, if you have an average router, you may want it (or an added access point if it’s a mesh network) to be no more than say 30 feet away (birds-eye view) with as few walls in between as possible. If you have a flagship router like Netgear’s Nighthawk series, you may be able to get an extra 10-20 feet. As long as you can get the app to show your doorbell as being good or very good, your router or access point position should be just fine.
- Quality of your internet. Of course, streaming video requires a good connection. A connection goes both ways though when it comes to viewing a camera remotely. You may have a good download, but you want good upload speed as well. It actually doesn’t take much, but you also have to consider everything else running on the network that may also be using some of your upstream. As long as your upstream/upload is 10Mbps or greater, you should be fine. If you have a busy house with plenty of IoT devices, then 20Mbps+ would be ideal (upload). Typically, most internet service providers won’t give you anything more than 20 or 30 Mbps on the upstream sadly.
Download Ring’s new sidekick app called “Rapid Ring” that installs along-side the Ring app. It launched a few months ago (August 2019 I believe). It’s a dumbed-down version of the Ring app, made specifically for answering motion and ring notifications. No other bloat options, just connect and view. It seems to connect to and load the camera much quicker than the main app. This may be part of their testing of a new connection approach that they will hopefully just build into the main app, but for now, you have to install it separately and along-side the Ring app. It does seem to work quite well. You can find it for both iOS (Apple) and Android devices.(As of July 27, 2022, Ring has discontinued this app and is no longer supporting it)
If you are still finding that it takes far too long to connect to the doorbell, you should reach out to Ring and let them know your situation. Let them know you followed the steps here and you need additional support/ideas. They may have a few extra tips up their sleeve, or you might just have a bad unit.
If you have other issues beyond this, like sound or resolution issues, you can also try our guide here that walks you through a lot of these as well.
Found alternative solutions through your own troubleshooting? Feel free to share below in the comments!
