Background
When I moved to a new house this summer I wanted to get high-speed internet to my office now that COVID-19 has me working from home for the foreseeable future. The issue was that the wifi located in the living room had trouble reaching the upstairs office and I wanted to get the fastest possible connection to my devices.
The house I am renting does not have built-in Ethernet to all the rooms but does have coax. This started me thinking that it might be possible for a device to share the coax channel with the modem. I found MoCA The Multimedia over Coax Alliance that specifies a signal standard that could coexist on the same coax channel as the internet modem.
There are several variants of the MoCA standard but the most common that are available are the v2.0 which are capable of supporting Gigabit Ethernet. There are new v2.5 adapters but they are harder to find and more expensive to purchase and there is even a v3.0 standard but I don’t think any adapters have been manufactured yet.
The Coax Channel
With the introduction of DOCSIS 3.1, the frequencies that MoCA uses are now overlapping. This poses an interference issue between the two signals that might need to be resolved.
Thankfully the standards body for MoCA has released some helpful information for interoperability between the two signals, which can be found at the link below.
MoCA 2.0 Sharing Channel with DOCSIS 3.1
MoCA Devices
I went with the Actiontec Bonded MoCA 2.0 Adapter because it was easy to find and had the majority of the reviews (mostly positive) and it supports Gigabit speeds and a pair can easily be bought for ~$170.
Actiontec Bonded MoCA 2.0 Ethernet to Coax Adapter
The MoCA 2.5 Adapter was out of stock when I needed the device, and it is more expensive with only 1 review when I last checked.
Actiontec MoCA 2.5 Network Adapter for Ethernet Over Coax
The devices state that they are not compatible with: Direct TV, Dish or other satellite TV, AT&T Internet, and AT&T U-verse coax networks.
My Setup
Overall the setup was pretty straight forward. To set up the devices all I needed was the provided coax splitter that allows both the modem and the MoCA adapter to be connected to the house coax network. I then connected the modem directly to the WiFi router, I then added a switch to connect the MoCA adapter and other ethernet devices to the internet. Then I connected the other MoCA adapter, in the office, to the coax port, and to my other WiFi router. This provides a backhaul for the mesh WiFi and another ethernet switch allows a fast internet connection to my work laptop and other equipment.
I have Xfinity internet service provider and a DOCSIS 3.1 Modem for Gigabit Service, so I am unsure how the MoCA adapter will work with other ISPs. I have seen some people use a Point of Entry (PoE) Filter to limit the interference between MoCA and Internet connection but I have not needed to do so.
I also do not have cable TV, which could complicate the setup, requiring more PoE Filters on your cable TV box.
Currently, I only have 2 adapters, but I think it is possible to add more. The documentation is a bit unclear if it is possible with the bonded pair adapters I bought. So that will be an experiment for later if I ever need more.
Speed Test
I ran two speed tests shown in the table below using https://www.speedtest.net/ . The earlier test is directly connected to my eero router which is getting 887Mbps down and 36.86Mbps up which is very close to my gigabit service. The next test is run directly connected to the office MoCA adapter output where I am getting ~800Mbps down ad 20Mbps up. This shows that I can get close to gigabit speeds over the MoCA adapters with some loss as the coax channel in my house might not be ideal. The upload speed decreasing by ~16Mbps is a bit concerning and will require more investigation.
I have also noticed that running the test more than once can eliminate some of the less than ideal speeds.
Conclusions
So far I have been getting close to Gigabit bandwidth on the connection and am very happy with the results. The adapters are easy to set up and have not had any reliability issues over the past month of use.
