How MoCA Made My Home Network Faster Than Mesh Wifi
I love tinkering with Wi-Fi, but when I’m building my network backbone in a new location – home, apartment, or wherever – I try to use a wired network as much as possible. Wireless bridges and tri-band mesh / extender are great and convenient, but I always value the stability and speed of an Ethernet cable.
When I recently invited my friends to help set up their home using a wired backbone, I ran into a funny problem: there are no Ethernet connections in any of their rooms. This didn’t really surprise me as it tends to be a more modern convenience that older homes simply don’t have. However, this is a bit annoying, especially when you don’t have a lot of time to get something up and running and you don’t want to cut holes in the wall and thread the cables yourself. (I did it; they just didn’t really want it to last that long, especially when they could just use Wi-Fi and end the day.)
An ingenious solution to this problem? MoCA, or Multimedia over Coaxial Cable. I have known about this technology for a long time, but until now I have not had the time (or need) to play with it. In my friends house, every room was connected with a coaxial cable, making this the perfect solution. I could just use MoCA instead of Ethernet-MoCA 2.0, technically, which gives up to full gigabit speed and should be more than enough (even if it doesn’t work that fast) for my friends’ ~ 400MB internet plan. And, unlike me, they don’t actually send a bunch of files across their living space, so top speed wasn’t a major issue either.
I picked up a set of two TrendNET TMO-311C2K adapters and got to work, which took me only five minutes because I was being stupid . Unsurprisingly, plugging the MoCA adapters into the various coaxial ports around the house did absolutely nothing . No signal. If I had fiddled with MoCA before, it wouldn’t have come as a big surprise. But after coming from Ethernet country, I just expected everything that comes out of the wall to be connected together. Not much when it comes to your coax connections.
This is partly due to the very nature of cabling around the house. Unlike Ethernet, where you connect 16 different cables together using a relatively inexpensive switch, and each connection can still deliver the full theoretical maximum speed of 1Gbps, connecting eight different coaxial cables together will result in signal fading or loss as a result of yours. you need to split the signal . It might not matter much if you just want to take one cable connection and run it into two rooms, but if you want a reliable coaxial connection in every room, you need at least an amplifier.
This is just one big way of saying that I wasn’t too surprised to find that many of the coaxial cables around my friends’ house are simply not connected to anything. I was eventually able to confirm this by tracing the wires to the outside of the house, where I discovered where all the disconnected cables ended. Then I took one of these to check which cable goes to which room in the house:
I also took a MoCA PoE filter and one high quality splitter to give the house the best possible signal. And, as you probably guessed, my goal was to use MoCA to connect the room downstairs to the room upstairs using coaxial Ethernet. Since there was a cable modem in the upstairs room, I could:
- Configure the wireless access point below. Connect it via MoCA to the router upstairs to create two Wi-Fi bubbles with fast wired backbone.
- Also connect the router upstairs to your cable modem.
- Connect the cable modem to the MoCA adapter upstairs, which will also be connected to the router (via Ethernet).
In other words, the cable connection will do all the hard work of transferring data around the house, and I will be able to connect both coaxial devices (cable modem) and Ethernet-based devices (everything else) thanks to the MoCA adapters.
Easy peasy. And I’m not just jaunty; as soon as I plugged in the PoE filter and plugged in the splitter, connecting the cable connections in both rooms, the MoCA adapters lit up letting me know they can see each other. In five minutes, my network was up and it couldn’t be easier. There was now Wi-Fi on both floors of the house, and this was a much faster solution than installing the grid my friends had dealt with before. (As convenient as it may be, it has prevented my friends from reaching top speed nearly as much as they currently use MoCA as the backbone of their network.)
To me? I’m going to add MoCA to the list of tools in my networking arsenal. I used to have a mindset like “We’ll just run an Ethernet cable all over the place and it looks great,” but it’s much easier to be able to plug a small $ 50 adapter into an existing coax connection in the room and call it a day. More expensive, of course, but now I don’t have to fiddle with cabling all over the house. I wonder what I’m going to do with this 75ft Cat6 Ethernet cable I’ve been lugging around for the past few years.