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This is a comment for folks in homes with coax run for cable TV. Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access point
by jmathai 3y ago
This is a comment for folks in homes with coax run for cable TV.
Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access points or jacks in the office to connect directly to my computer. The speeds and consistency over wifi and mesh were remarkable. Especially consistency.
We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous. And I learned that you can get up to 2.5gbps data transfer over coax using the MoCA standard.
So now, I can run wired networking connections anywhere in the house for wired access points or connecting directly to computers, televisions, etc.
- thehappypm 3y agoI do this too and it is terrific, literally indistinguishable from ethernet. What’s amazing is you can run cable and MoCa on the same wire at the same time!
- teeray 3y agoHow does this work with both? Is there a defined band plan standard that cable operators know to avoid? Do you need to install a notch filter on the line coming into the house?
- coin 3y agoMOCA modems looks for unused bandwidth
- spookthesunset 3y agoI think it just sits in the mutli-ghz bands. It shouldn’t conflict with cable, which uses lower frequency bands. You just gotta make sure to install a low pass filter at your demarcation point so you aren’t broadcasting your MoCA stuff beyond your home. You also have to use appropriate splitters that are rated for the top ends of the spectrum.
- a-priori 3y agoIt's more the other way around. There's a defined band plan, because historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio, so it inherited the broadcast TV band plan. Then digital TV inherited the analogue cable band plan and added higher-frequency channels. To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for digital cable. So if I wanted to transmit Ethernet over cable, I'd use a 2GHz band or something to avoid interference.
- retrac 3y ago> historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio Well, to be pedantic, that is still how it works. And it's how cable Internet works. And it's also how a lot of techniques over twisted pair work, too. The conductor is used as a waveguide and a very-much-analogue signal encoding a digital signal is what is sent over the line. DOCSIS 3 uses up to QAM-4096, which can encode 12 bits in a single symbol on the line, by using multiple steps of amplitude shift and phase shift, to encode bits. Quite similar to how FM radio works, just digital steps, rather than an analogue continuum between 0 and 100 amplitude and 0 and 100 phase, at the decoder. This has even started showing up for links within a single computer, now. The latest revision of PCIe uses modulated RF (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) rather than simple binary voltage levels.
- kube-system 3y agoMoCa was designed specifically to work over existing coax used for TV and behave with existing signals. The board of the consortium that designed it includes Comcast, Cox, and Verizon. It was basically a solution for "we're gonna need internet in our customer's homes but we already ran coax in them"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI should've done that instead of try and replace the coax with network cables; they all run through cable guides (yellow tubes), but they're probably bent, nicked and collapsed after installation so you can't just replace the cables through it.
- voxadam 3y agoMoCA can be useful but doesn't it still encapsulate Ethernet at its lowest layer?
- mangeld 3y agoIf there's already a coax cable run what's stopping you from running an ethernet cable alongside it or replacing it?
- jakderrida 3y agoBecause he uses MoCa instead.
- Chabsff 3y agoCoax runs in residential houses tend not to go through conduits, and often squeeze through holes in joists just barely big enough for the cable. Not to mention that, in my experience, they also tend to involve splitters in the absolute most random of locations. Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.
- ellisv 3y agoI haven't run Ethernet, but if I do the drops will be very near the coaxial cables because they're an easy reference.
- tetris11 3y agoIf the endpoints have a hidden fork in between, then what you are shovelling in on one end might not be what comes out the other.
- massysett 3y agoLaziness. I’d much rather spend $100 on gizmos than spend hours on a home improvement project. And these projects are never as simple as they at first promise to be.
- tinus_hn 3y agoMoCa is just a standard to run the Ethernet network over Coax cables Nobody runs the Ethernet cables from 50 years ago, we use modern standards to run the Ethernet network over modern cables. Typically the ‘UTP’ cables but not necessarily.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI have the exact situation. Like 8 coax lines in the home but no Ethernet. Can someone point me in a consumer-ready direction? I imagine I can do this: - put cable modem in basement where line comes in. - do something that goes from router to into 2-3 coax lines heading into the home. - have some little box in those rooms that expose an Ethernet port.
- zylent 3y agoI’ve used this model for a few networks and had a good time. Minimal setup and supports a WPS-like security. https://a.co/d/4aC81NS https://a.co/d/4aC81NS See the diagram in this guide: https://www.motorolacable.com/documents/MM1025-QuickStart-revA.pdf https://www.motorolacable.com/documents/MM1025-QuickStart-re... Note both the usage of the PoE (point of entry, not power) filter, as well as the MoCA network encapsulating both DOCSIS and Ethernet traffic. Some set-top boxes and modems are MoCA compatible, but I prefer using a discrete unit.
- Waterluvian 3y agoOh wow I don’t even need to isolate my incoming cable Internet from it. Thank you for these links. This is exactly what I needed to move forward.
- tecleandor 3y agoOh, so you can connect several devices to the same "shared" coax cable around the house? How is it? Is it really 2.5gbps or is it like Powerline adaptors that are an order of magnitude slower than their advertised speed? :P
- judge2020 3y agoI was able to hit >2gbps in speed tests using goCoax MoCA adapters when I used them, but it isn't "full duplex", so you won't see 2.5 down and up at the same time, for example.
- jasonjayr 3y agoI'm using MoCA to connect two parts of my house that I have not been able to pull CAT5 too. There is a latency hit when using MoCA compared to Ethernet: MoCA: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 3.24/4.02/4.64 Ethernet: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 0.365/0.461/0.515
- ellisv 3y agoYes. My setup is like this: Fiber ONT/Modem -> Access Point -> MoCA adapter 1 -> Coax Splitter Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 2 -> Switch -> bunch of devices Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 3 -> Switch -> Access Point + bunch of devices Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 4 -> Access Point the MoCA adapters actually report 3Gbps+ between each other, but my access points only have gigabit Ethernet so that's my bottleneck. There are different standards of coaxial cable (RG-6, RG-59, etc). If you see low speeds with MoCA, it is probably a cable problem and not an adapter problem.
- spookthesunset 3y agoI can pull down a gig/sec no problem. Dunno how well it handles congestion or anything but it is way more than adequate for home use.
- roessland 3y agoCool! I have the same issue with unused coax cables between every room, and was planning on replacing them with ethernet cables. In my case it's feasible without breaking down any walls. Does this work even with splitters?
- judge2020 3y agoYes, it works with splitters. Just be careful because you'll lose signal strength on each split, your splitter should have a number on it for how much is lost.
- spookthesunset 3y agoMake sure your splitter is rated for like 1.8ghz so you don’t dramatically attenuate your signal. Cheap splitters will probably cause trouble.
- frankjr 3y agoAnother way to get something supposedly more stable than wifi when ethernet cabling is not feasible is to use your house's electric wiring and run data through that. There are kits which offer data rates in gigabits (although based on a few reviews I read the actual speed vary greatly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa7017p-kit https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...
- velcrovan 3y agoThe few times I have run into these, the actual performance is terrible. Wifi is almost always better.
- LeanderK 3y agoit's been 10 years but I had great success running internet into the basement this way. Wifi was terrible down there (router was in the upper floor) and there wasn't an existing ethernet cable going down. Of course it wasn't perfect but it was trivial to set up and worked.
- chpatrick 3y agoSame for me, my parents house had no WiFi signal downstairs or Ethernet in the walls. A powerline wifi extender kit worked out of the box and is fast enough for their needs.
- markofzen 3y agoI had a similar issue until I limited the amount of wire between the connections. For example I put one right by an outlet under my breaker box, then another in my garage right where the subpanel is and it improved dramatically.
- Symbiote 3y agoMine is, in theory, 2Gb/s. In practise, nearer 50Mb/s. It also causes interference on my amplifier, although it's a cheap amplifier. About once a year one of the adaptors loses its connection to the other adaptor, and instead connects to someone else's setup in this apartment building.
- tzs 3y ago> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s. I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them. The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that. I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop. Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch. Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together. Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?
- graphe 3y agoEthernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.
- pzmarzly 3y agoIn that's your usecase, it's better to save yourself the hassle and just set up good WiFi
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 3y agoCan confirm. Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking. So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters. I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater. I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoAlso, check the phone lines. If it's recent enough build, it will use Cat5 (or higher, but probably not) for the phone lines.
- hackmiester 3y agoEven if not... I've managed to link at Gigabit over category 3 cable of a short distance.
- teeray 3y agoOne issue with that is that electricians can sometimes be brutal on Cat5 used as a phone line. I’ve had drops that were basically unusable as ethernet because some of the pairs were damaged, even though the phone pair in use was fine.
- tyrfing 3y agoEven MUCH older phone lines can push gigabit with G.fast, I have gigabit fiber internet in early 1980s construction that way.
- kjs3 3y agoYou can get ethernet to coax baluns and get 100Mbps and PoE. They're extremely reliable, passive (so little to break) and cheap. There might be gig versions now. They're used to retrofit older surveillance camera wiring plants to ethernet without ripping out all the cables, but don't really care what type of ethernet device is on each end. If all you have is old phone wires in the wall, you can get a pair of xDSL (HVDSL) modems back to back and get up to 10Mbps or so. Better than nothing.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI actually couldn’t get ethernet at fast enough speeds compared to wifi over the last couple years with wifi over 1gbps and Ethernet stuck at 100mb/s or a single port of 1gbps or a single one that’s faster and none of my devices having that port or the cat5e wires being questionable what time span were you talking about? Was this decades ago?
- tingletech 3y agoI thought ethernet was more of the wire protocol than the cable. I could have sworn that the "ethernet" cables when I first started working were coax, and the article talks about the first ethernet being on coax. Seems like ethernet in modern usage is synonymous with CAT5.
- michaelt 3y agoAh yes, "Thick Ethernet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and "Thin Ethernet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.
- FFP999 3y agoAnd if a single vampire tap comes loose, the entire network segment goes down. Don't miss that.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoAnd 10BaseT! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair) Anybody else remember "vampire connections"? [Ah, a minute late. FFP999 remembers them.]
- wkat4242 3y agoThe first Ethernet was on coax yes. It was also a shared physical bus so the 10 megabit was often shared among a room full of computers. Despite this it felt speedy!! But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches. Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.
- FFP999 3y ago> Despite this it felt speedy!! When the most common data transfer technology is a POTS modem that can do 56kb/second...
- hnarn 3y ago> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room Obviously a bit late for this, but I don’t understand, if there’s “coax to nearly every room” how can it also be “not feasible” to run new cables? If nothing else surely you could just run ethernet or even fiber in the physical channels now used by coax? Especially if the alternative is setting up an entire switching set up for moving ethernet over coax.
- trapexit 3y agoIn American homes, cables are typically stapled to the wood frame construction, not run in conduit. You have to cut open the finished wall surface to change them.
- hnarn 3y agoRight, that makes sense. I’m realizing now I just assumed conduits were the norm.
- atomicnumber3 3y agoOP could almost be describing my house. New construction, coax to every room, no ethernet. And the builder specifically warned me not to try to use the existing coax to pull a new drop because it's all filled with fireproof foam/insulation stuff.
- massysett 3y agoIt’s always possible to run new Ethernet cable. Just think like a cable TV installation technician. Run it on the surface, drill through walls and fish as needed. Run it along the exterior if needed. It’s always possible. Not always pretty, but possible.
- atomicnumber3 3y agoI develop software for a living, my capabilities at layer 1 are quite limited. Also my wife would not go for visible Ethernet run like that. I'd have to hire a contractor to do drywall work to have it done right. I have managed to get Ethernet everywhere I want for the most part though, thanks to a luckily positioned unfinished half of the basement and garage, where visible cables are fine and I can just pop through walls here and there.
- elevation 3y agoWhat hardware adapters are you using?
- ellisv 3y agoI use goCoax adapters and recommend them. I haven't tried any other manufacturers. https://www.gocoax.com https://www.gocoax.com
- mmcnl 3y agoMoCA is great but the downside is that requires two active components. And leveraging PoE becomes impossible. Also, why not replace the coax cable with UTP? Tape some fish tape to your coax cable, and gently pull the coax cable on the other end. Then ape some UTP to the other end of the fish tape and pull again slowly. Pretty easy actually.
- xxpor 3y agoCable that was installed when the house was built is usually stapled to the studs, making it close to impossible to simply pull out unfortunately.
- mmcnl 3y agoI'm not familiar with this type of construction. Where I live any wiring is run through pipes.
- spookthesunset 3y agoTrue but if you don’t care about another power brick on both ends… it’s a quick, dirty, fast and effective way to bring wired Ethernet to every room with a cable jack.
- Spivak 3y agoAm I missing something? Given most residential equipment tops out at 1G isn't coax better than if ethernet had been ran?
- bpye 3y agoI have 10Gbps between my home server and desktop. Is it overkill? Sure, but I do use my home server for networked storage in Lightroom etc so having it be even slightly faster is nice.
- spookthesunset 3y agoMoCA really doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Everybody always thinks if WiFi repeaters, or Ethernet over power line but MoCA is much faster and more reliable than either of them! It’s perfect for apartments that have cabletv jacks in every room. Just make sure you are using the appropriate wideband splitters and have a filter at the cable demarcation in your dwelling.
- appplication 3y agoThe problem I’ve found with moca is that every time I’ve tried it (3x now), there’s always something going on behind the walls that ends up completely ruining it. Someone put filters or splitters in, or something to that extent, and it turns out there’s insane packet loss or sub MB speed or it just doesn’t work for some reason.
- charlie0 3y agoMoCA is really expensive. You're better off just hiring someone to wire the house up. Id
- eikenberry 3y agoHow cheap are electricians where you live? MoCA adapters are around $50/each where electricians are around $200 just to visit + hourly and materials (US, west coast). That's a lot of MoCA devices.
- charlie0 3y agoYes, but you need 2 to start ($100), that's the cheaper version of the MOCA adapters (the high use cost $80/each) that's just one room. It's an extra $50/$80 per room. If you're only looking for one connection, MOCA seems alright, but if it's going to be multiple rooms, it's better (and cleaner) to just do the in-wall wiring. These prices are also recently reduced. Without them you're looking at $150/170 a pair depending on the version you buy. https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethernet/dp/B088KV2YYL/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1XGRIIGINGA7V&keywords=MOCA&qid=1700266763&sprefix=moca%2Caps%2C201&sr=8-3&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethern...
- brazzledazzle 3y agoIf you're willing to put the work in you can use the coax drops and runs as pulling line for cat, new coax (if you want to keep it) and real pulling line (to leave tied at the top and bottom of each drop if you ever need to run something else). Same idea if you have POTS copper run throughout. Most of the time even the ancient drops and runs have enough space cut out for a number of cables since doing runs is generally easier when the holes are larger.
- IshKebab 3y agoMaybe for plasterboard and timber construction. My house is mostly brick with the coax chased into the wall.
- brazzledazzle 3y agoAh, yeah my advice is definitely for sheet rock/dry wall based dwellings. I think you could manage to replace the coax run through brick with a single cat run though. I would buy and generously use wire pulling lubricant though.
- IshKebab 3y agoThe cables don't go through the brick; they're under plaster. No way are you removing that without destroying the plaster.
- maccard 3y agoThis has the nasty side effect of rendering WiFi pretty much unusable too.
- gwbas1c 3y agoWhen I built my house I ran both coax and ethernet to all my TVs. It was worth it. Even though I have an HD Homerun, the fact that my TV's menu's and remote work as-designed for live TV helps make things run much more smoothly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- toyg 3y agoI just replaced the coax cables. It's actually really easy to rewire: attach old and new cable together, and pull.
- rootusrootus 3y agoThat only works when the coax was a retrofit itself, and the house is small. If it was installed when the house was built, it'll be stapled in various places.
- sumtechguy 3y agoI just had a house built. I am 99% sure looking at all the pics I took it is not stapled in. The tricky ones are the ones where they decided to drill a hole thru the 2x4s in the wall about every 4 ft... Now I am not saying they do not do that (different areas have different ideas of what is 'right').
- ellisv 3y agoMy cables are all stapled to the studs, so pulling doesn't work that well :(
- rootusrootus 3y agoI agree with this. I finally bit the bullet and bought a bunch of MoCA adapters for my house. In practice I don't get the full 2.5 gigabit speed, but I do get about 1.7. Good 'nuf for my needs, for sure.
- graywh 3y agoI'm still using the coax for my OTA antenna
- anticensor 3y agoMoCA 3.0 actually supports 10gpbs.