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Comment by relyks | Hacker News Reader

Besides ethernet cables providing more stability to your network connection than WiFi, it isn't mentioned in the article. Not many people know about this: most houses have coaxial cable lined throughout. If your router is located in a different location in the house, you can use the coaxial cable to help create a network. You need two MoCA adapters (coaxial to ethernet) on both sides (one at the router/switch/gateway and another at your computer). Connect it all up… bingo, bango, bongo, and you got stable and fast internet! This is how I have the most stable connection in my house :)

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Also remember that even if you can't or don't want to connect your device via Ethernet, you might be able to use MoCA to easily move your WiFi router to a better location, or add a second router/mesh node with a reliable wired backhaul instead of a crappy radio backhaul, and that might make all the difference.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a house with pre-existing coax, apart from possibly an antenna connection. Is this a US thing?

Lots of US houses have coax to all the main rooms (family, bedrooms) because that was how you got cable TV.

(I still see it in new construction, though if I was having a build done I'd say run multiple Ethernet instead of any coax)

I'm just building a new house this year and Ethernet to every room is standard in this area. In a different state in the US coax is standard in new construction. (We just moved) It varies by location.

Around here it's coax + Ethernet to any "TV" room, Ethernet to all rooms (think - phone line).

Nope. As you say yourself: Possibly an antenna connection.

Exactly that. When we redid the floors i our apartment we renewed the electrical wiring and added ethernet and coax. The coax was intended for radio/tv.

There is however an overlap of people who have the foresight to add coax cabling also add ethernet a well.

If I was was re-doing today I would add more empty pipes and fiber.

Cabling ahead has a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor) when adding new gear :-)

I've lived in both Australia and the UK, and the only coaxial cables in any home I had/have have been direct point-to-point connections from the roof-mounted TV antenna to the corner of the sitting room where the TV was intended to be placed. Not terribly useful for computer networking.

In DK I would say it became common with the kitchen and maybe bedroom TV around 1990 and TVs in the kids rooms around 1995.

Cable TV became common in the 1980s (around here). So distribution is just a question about point of entry.

Are the aussies and UKensians that different?

Source: I worked at a TV/electronics shop in the early 90s.

Cable TV (from cables under the road) is much more common in Denmark than in the UK.

Digital, broadcast TV in the UK is mostly received by radio broadcast or satellite broadcast, so the house would only have the appropriate cables from certain rooms up to the roof. Thinking of the houses I lived in, it wouldn't have been practical to put a router of any kind up there.

From recent UK statistics:

- 95% of households have at least one television

- 30% receive TV over satellite

- 13% by cable

- 80% by IPTV

- 48% by terrestrial radio broadcast

- 96% have broadband internet

That's 13% of houses using their cables for a TV subscription, so more than that number have the cables available, but some big chunk probably had it installed to a single room in the 1980s and have never expanded it — the kitchen and the kids' room use terrestrial broadcast.

Most unreliable network I ever had the misfortune to use (not to install) was coax thin ethernet when I worked at the BBC - termination problems were terrible. Twisted pair for the win as far as I'm concerned or better, WiFi. I don't think I have any coax in my fairly modern UK house.

They don't mean 10Base2 "Thinnet", common in the late 1980s and in cheap installations in the early 1990s.

They mean a modern (ish) device which uses existing TV cabling, to avoid rewiring in houses.

Coax ethernet was often deployed as a bus: 20something computers that must be directly connected to a single cable going from room to room. If one of the plugs was unplugged or not tightened correctly, everyone on that line suffered. This happened a lot, people moved computers around. And the tech looks simple.

That is a different situation than installing a fixed, point to point connection.

Depending on how modern it is, you might well have "telephone extensions". In principle this is Cat 3 cable strung in a tree shape, but in practice the electrician is probably buying wholesale cable - carrying one reel of Cat 5 for all jobs is easier than owning a Cat 3 reel and a Cat 5 reel and bringing the right one for each job, the price is usually either identical or within pennies. So there's an excellent chance it's Cat 5 cable anyway†.

Now, Cat 5 cable is a perfectly good telephone cable, but it's also Gigabit Ethernet (over reasonable distances, you don't live in a mansion). The tree shape won't work for networking, but the individual cables buried in walls or elsewhere are basically just right there already. You just hook the existing cables to new Ethernet shaped faceplates. I am literally writing this from a wired connection in a bedroom, nobody built this to have Ethernet, they built it to put a phone in the main bedroom, but it's 2025, nobody owns a wired phone, everybody needs Internet.

† Also the network cards can't tell, they will try to achieve 1000 Mbit/s and chances are they succeed even if the cable isn't actually rated Category 5. I have retro-fitted modern switches to an ancient building (the old Mountbatten chip fab at the University of Southampton, before it burned down) and in 90+% of cases this "upgrades" the connection to Gigabit because the Cat 3 cable pulled a decade or more earlier was good enough.

You are talking about two cometelt different technologies. You are talking about 10BASE2 Ethernet which runs over RG-58/U coax cabling and as you mention requires termination at each end. It ran at a speed of 10Mbs. It could be unreliable for a variety of reasons such as connections coming lose, someone deciding to move their computer disconnecting a cable and breaking the continuos connection between stations that is required or a large number of Ethernet collisions because if either misbehaving nics or too many stations on a segment.

Currently there is MOCA hardware which supports speeds up to 2.5Gbs. The standard for 10Gbs has been released but no hardware for it is currently available. At least not to consumers. MOCA runs over the coax that is often already installed in homes to support cable, satellite or over the air antenna TV. It uses different frequencies and thus can coexist with these on the same cable. MOCA is not Ethernet. It is a half duplex shared medium protocol using time division multiplexing. It was originally developed to distribute IP TV without the need to run additional wiring in a house. Today it is mostly used to bring broadband internet connections into a home or to bridge Ethernet connections through a home. Different frequencies are set aside for each purpose and so both can be done at the same time. It is very reliable. I use it to extend my network to several out buildings on my property which had coax run to them many many years ago.

Thanks for that - very informative. I must admit I haven't done anything with wired networks for many years! But I still like twisted pair, and wifi :-)

If you do this doing forget to add a moca filter where your cable enters your house, otherwise you will leak your Ethernet signal to anyone who is on the same cable.

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