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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

for those who do not have old pipes to use, most of us have coax, there is something called MOCA, simply go onto amazon or whatever and search. it allows you to run your ethernet over the cable tv coax in your house "over the top" of any cable tv you have runnning on it. cable uses the first 800Mhz of spectrum on the coax, moca rides above 1ghz so they can coexist. You can extend ethernet from any coax outlet to any other coax outlet. not hole punching, not central vacuum or whatever.

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If you do already have telephone and/or coax cabling in your home, it might be easier in the long run to just replace it to be honest. Ethernet sockets and cables are cheap, and don't consume power.

I was looking into MOCA, but eventually I decided against it due to pricing and latency concerns. In the end, I opened up the coax socket at my router, tied an ethernet cable to the coax cable, went to my office (room above the room where the router is), opened up the coax socket, pulled out the coax cable, and voila, I now had an ethernet cable in the duct.

And you don't even have to lose the coax cabling. If you tie two ethernet cables to the coax cable, pull them both through the duct, you can then pull the coax cable back in place.

It's not that simple everywhere, We have brick walls, replacing cables means lot of dust and repairing those opened walls... provided you don't damage anything already there.

So here I'm feeling adventurous for pushing 10 GbE over a run of Cat5E for the next decade or more.

True, although if you are lucky your cables run through cable ducts. My house was built in 1935 and has brick walls as well, but all cables run through plastic cable ducts embedded in the walls. Where I'm from this is very common, as virtually all housing has brick (or concrete) walls.

Unfortunately, I bet a lot of this kind of cable is stapled down along the run. And with enough twist and turns I'm not confident the existing wire wouldn't break while being pulled, even without the staples.

Wow, running Ethernet over coax like it's the 80s again. Nothing new under the sun I guess

Ya, well, Moca 3 is pretty new BTW, and it's not your mommy's ethernet over coax, you are thinking of old timey ieee802.3 this is full on OFDM modulation over coax, RF'ey stuff like Docis. Fios uses this to get your signal in over your house cabling.

I use it to get my mm-wave 5G 2Gbps signal from my antenna on my garage over the same coax my cable TV runs on to my lab in my basement and have a wifi AP for the rest of the place.

Ya, sorry, I stream but I still like my cable, shrug :)

Everything but the termination.

https://www.ieee802.org/3/ethernet_diag.html

very famous diagram !

Make sure you put a filter on the outside of your house if it is hooked to the cable system so you don't create feedback and screw everyone else around you who are using the cable system.

> You can extend ethernet from any coax outlet to any other coax outlet. not hole punching, not central vacuum or whatever.

Man that would be perfect, except the main coax is already being used for my internet as is. I wish HFC for the NBN would hurry up and die already.

MoCA and cable internet use different frequencies so you can still use them. I'm currently using those adapters with comcast.

Interesting. I'll look into it and see whether it's possible.

While my highly-tuned Wifi 6 setup at home is honestly quite excellent (even for my competitive FPS gaming needs, and even wireless VR has been brilliant), it would be nice to ditch it for higher reliability.

Problem is, I'm pretty sure my rental has a single coax socket for cable TV (which is used for my NBN internet connection now). I'll have a look though!

Also Ethernet to bridging MoCA does add on about 3-5ms of latency round trip. Whether this is of any concern is another thing, it probably isn’t for most - but it is something to know.

As I mentioned in the top post that it runs over the top of docis which is what the cablecos use which is 800Mhz and below and Moca is above 1Ghz so they coexist.

Yeah fair enough, though I think the bigger challenge for me is that most places I've lived in, in Australia, have a single cable connection point in the lounge room and that's it (for Foxtel). Though I'm going to check!

For what its worth, I saw this comment and bought Moca hardware (ScreenBeam Bonded). Ten minutes of setup later after an Amazon delivery and I'm happier with Netflix / Prime / Hulu / etc. There is literally no comparison on the performance I'm now getting.

I have Fiber to the house and then an Eero first generation to provide Wifi. I also have an AmpliFi HD. And we still had regular (3x per week) problems with streaming video.

THANK YOU !!!!

I learned about MoCA from this thread too. Placed an order the next day and set it up today morning, and now my desk downstairs has a direct wired connection running at full speed, all the way across the house. This was an incredible solution for my needs!

There is also Ethernet over powerline via powerline adapters. I run these in my apartment. From the router you plug a “host” adapter into an outlet, plug in the ethernet cable. Now you have a source. Throughout the rest of the apartment or house you plug-in a receiving adapter (there’s a little sync button to sync it to the host) and plug in an ethernet cable as an output. Plug that into a small switch if you need more connections. Repeat throughout your home. It’s just as cool as MOCA.

yup although not sure you get the speeds you get with MOCA 3 ?

10Gbps !

Oh for sure there’s no way I’m getting those speeds. I don’t have that need though. A simple 1Gbps is enough for me. While advertised as 1Gbps adapters, I get at max 800Mbps which is fine. I don’t suffer from stuttering or packet loss as reported by others. I also don’t have a bunch of RF interference as reported by others. So I’m happy with them and will continue to use them.

Ethernet over powerline adapters cause enormous RF interference for HAM radio operators. Please do not use them.

Really? Because I have an ICOM transceiver and have no interference at all.

Might depend on your shack/feedline/antenna location, too. As in every other part of ham radio, YMMV.

It very much depends what band/frequency you are listening on. An Icom TRX could be HF, VHF, or UHF. And of course it will depend where your antenna is.

I would choose MOCA over Powerline. Powerline trips AFCI breakers, is really sensitive to other devices and wiring quality, add even in best conditions seems to perform worse (in my experience).

Powerline sucks. It's slow (in most houses you're lucky to get 100mbps throughput even with high end "2000mbps" adapters), and it tends to suffer from bad jitter and latency spikes to the point where it's more like bad wifi, while MOCA is generally pretty close to ethernet in terms of having basically no additional jitter or ping spikes (only real downside is the cost of the MOCA adapters, and that it's a shared link between all the adapters so you're limited to eg. 2.5Gbps combined on all MOCA links, which isn't a problem for most people).

Also, for the cost of either powerline or MOCA adapters you can buy a big roll of CAT6 CMR and a fish bit and run ethernet through the walls (just do a good job on the patches if you're renting).

I've gotten a pretty reliable 400-500mbps over a "2gbps" powerline adapter. Granted this was in small 1-2br apartments, but you're probably dealing with only one coax jack in the whole place and it's not feasible/worth it to run your own cabling.

Imo, in a small 1-2br apartment it's easy enough to run ethernet and hide it along the walls, either by tucking it under the moulding if you have carpet, or using cable hiders.

I'm also just laser focused on good consistent latency though after years of suffering awful cable internet and trying to minimize all latency that I could control (https://i.imgur.com/i84mIsD.png was what it was like during the day in 2020 in the first wfh period. Luckily I've only been getting consistent spikes up to ~200ms throughout 2021 /s).

edit: That ping was on hardwired ethernet with no load as well, and Rogers (realistically the only ISP where I live in Canada because my available Bell DSL connection is too slow) was throttling uploads to 4mbps.

My go-to solution for routing ethernet while renting are 3M Command Hooks. They are remarkably strong, while being easy to remove – albeit a tad bit on the expensive side.

I am using MOCA 2.5 go get my 2Gbps over my coax, MOCA 3 does 10Gbps.

I have to begrudgingly agree with you. A couple years ago I plopped a couple powerline adapters on either end of my house. They're on different circuits, but the same phase of the panel.

It worked great. I got a consistent 80Mbps through them. I was happy and probably commented here or elsewhere about how they can work, or, "don't dismiss it, it might just be the trick."

Well, now they're pretty flaky. They still work just enough for me to keep using them, but other WiFi issues I'm having are convincing me that I gotta stop being lazy and run some cable to all my rooms. (I even have a crawlspace! It will be relatively easy if I can just get cracking on it.)

I don't know what changed between then and now. Phone chargers on the circuit? That random smart plug I bought last year? My A/C cycling in the summer? Doesn't matter. Powerlines are a hostile environment for high-speed data.

If you have accessible spaces and don't have high ceilings, this is true. If you have neither basement nor attic (or they are not accessible easily), or you have ceilings high enough to require crossbraces, and especially if you only need to make one or two runs, MoCA is very cost-effective.

Nooo, please don't use that.

They basically turn all the electrical wires in your house into a giant antenna and radiate broadband noise.

I honestly don't know how the damn things are even legal by the FCC given how noisy they are.

They basically turn all the electrical wires in your house into a giant antenna and radiate broadband noise.

And they do it very poorly, I've never been able to get powerline networking to work well. I had trouble reaching the Wifi node in my office from the bedroom on the far side of the house, I thought powerline networking was the answer, but the link was not that fast (around 10mbit), with very variable latency, anywhere from 5msec to 100msec, and around 2% packet drops. Both outlets were on the same leg of my home power panel, I verified it at the breaker box.

I finally ended up putting up a couple Unifi Nanostation M2's (the bigger ones with the 10dBi antennas) aimed at each other through the walls to act as a point to point network, and it was faster and more reliable. Still not super fast, I get like 30mbit, but latency is a nice constant 7msec, with little packet loss.

But in a previous house, the walls were real plaster with metal lath behind acting as a faraday cage, and I had no choice but to use powerline networking (it was a rental house, so I couldn't easily run ethernet)

I wonder how they prevent your network from extending to your neighbors. Is there some kind of encryption setup?

I use those and have a generally positive view on them, but from personal experience, the adapters tend to de-synchronize, and re-synchronizing them is a pain (first of all because you need to actually access them, but since they are ugly they are generally kept hidden in hard to reach places).

They are also the other issues people reported.

IMO, they are fine in a rental where you don't have a lot of options and don't expect too much, but if you have a choice, use a better alternative.

Powerline networking is a terrible idea. Trying to feed RF over unshielded and electrically noisy wires is doomed to failure, as the signals can leak both in and out. P/L will cause interference to other services and also suffer from interference.

The big problem is that it might work just fine one day, then fail catastrophically if anything in the environment changes.

oh man this is why i read HN; i had no idea that this existed-- somehow-- and am the kind of person that runs ethernet cables all over the house rather than compromise in any way (powerline SUCKS ASS); and also i happen to currently live in a house with 1.2 trillion coax jacks, but no cat5/6 wiring to speak of, so this seems like it completely solves my problem in the best possible way. i don't know if i could possibly be more excited than this (i wish i were kidding more than i am).

yeah, sure, if i got a bunch of really fancy wireless equipment, that could probably swing it too, but would also require getting new WiFi cards to actually be able to take advantage.

I learn about in the last house I had which was in FiOS (fiber) available area and I of course ordered it and when they were installing it I asked the guy a bunch of questions and one was "who are you getting the signal across my Cable TV Coax" and he told me they were using MoCa so I googled it later and thought wow, that's interesting.

Then Later I moved to this place and there is no FiOS but I have mm-wave 5G (2Gbps) but there was no Ethernet cable in the house so I thought, hey, I know, I will use that MoCa thing, and it worked like a charm, got my signal from the CPE antenna unit mounted on my Garage (best signal) down to my lab in my basement.

I had no idea MOCA existed. Thanks for this.

Good Point, I bet a lot of people are not aware of it as an option, I just submitted this link as new

https://www.techreviewer.com/tech-answers/moca-vs-ethernet

I think it is a pretty decent review of the pro's and con's of using Ethernet cable vs. Ethernet cable. Perhaps others not reading this thread could also benefit from the knowledge.

Yes, thank you. Ordered -70db MoCA point-of-entry filter for $5.

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