So with MoCA 2.0 they are finally being used and actually these Actiontec adapters worked out fine.
MOCA ADAPTER SETUP TV
I have coax wiring in almost every room but it's gone unused except for one cable modem and then just making use of PlayStation Vue on my Fire TV Sticks / Roku devices for viewing on each of the TVs. This was my first time dealing with MoCA adapters and it worked out well and actually exceeded my expectations. Thus I decided to finally pickup some Actiontec MoCA 2.0 adapters for expanding my network. While having some older Ethernet powerline adapters, they are awfully slow, rather unreliable, and a hassle with for instance not being able to connect the Ethernet powerline adapter into a surge protector. Though that's fairly slow especially with recently having connected the HD Nest Cam Outdoor. With each of these MoCA 2.0 devices you can connect a PC/router/device to them to expand your "wired" network via the coax cable in your house.įor adequate wireless coverage and offloading some of the wireless connectivity of my Nest smoke detectors, security cameras, and other WiFi-based IoT devices I had been using a wireless adapter connected to a secondary 802.11ac WiFi router. The Actiontec ECB6000 is a standard MoCA 2.0 device while the ECB6200 is a bonded MoCA 2.0 device for faster connectivity and also has a pass-through port on the device for still allowing a TV or other device to be connected. There remain few MoCA 2.0 devices on the market with among the few being from Actiontec. You can build your own network over the existing cable TV / coax wiring in your house and it's more reliable and faster than powerline Ethernet. MoCA 2.0 has been around since 2010 and its basic standard allows for 400 Mbps throughput (or 800 Mbps throughput for bonded devices), a one in 100M packet error rate, sleep and low power modes, and uses 500~1650MHz for the operating frequency on coax cable. But in looking for alternatives to Ethernet over powerline when expanding my network, I ended up setting up a MoCA 2.0 system while running some Linux performance benchmarks along the way.įor those unaware of MoCA, it's an industry standard for allowing multimedia/Ethernet over traditional coax cable wiring. Of course, replacing the splitters and amplified splitter is really what made the difference, but the Motorolas were easier to wire into my network.The MoCA 2.0 specification is six years but there still aren't many consumer devices making use of this "Multimedia over Coax Alliance" standard nor the newer MoCA 2.5 standard. I had made a previous effort with the ActionTec adapters, gave it up, and returned them. I have the Motorola MM1000 adapters, by the way.more plug and play than the ActionTec ones. I'm very happy that I put in the MoCA, very solid and robust. If I have only one eero node connected to the gateway node via MoCA, that's fine, too. But once you get it connnected and working, your eero nodes should just start using it. So you have to do a little research, and understand what you might need to replace or change about your current cable TV coax network. The amplified splitter also has a POE MoCA filter, which keeps my MoCA signals out of the neighborhood cable TV network :-). I replaced the amplified splitter at our old cable point-of-entry (POE) with the MoCA 2.0 compatible one, and suddenly everything started working. The other thing is that we have an amplified splitter here, and that also has to be MoCA 2.0 compatible. I had to replace a couple of my existing splitters with compliant ones to get MoCA to work properly here. First off, coax cable splitters need to be MoCA 2.0 compatible, which means that they have to go up to 1675MHz.
![moca adapter setup moca adapter setup](https://motorolacable.com/images/diagrams/MoCA_Diagram_home-coax-network_rev3.png)
Just turned on the adapters, watched the lights on the adapters indicate "connected", and off it went. The eero just started using the MoCA connection as soon as I had it working, I didn't have to do anything.
![moca adapter setup moca adapter setup](https://homegearhunt.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MOTOROLA-MOCA-Adapter-for-Ethernet-Over-Coax.jpg)
The MoCA provides a "wired-equivalent" connection between the gateway eero and the two remote eeros. There's another MoCA adapter at each of our two main TV's using their cable TV coax ports, where there's also an eero node (not coincidentally :-) ).
![moca adapter setup moca adapter setup](https://cdn-r.fishpond.com.au/0046/602/465/169704718/6.jpeg)
To illustrate, I have a MoCA adapter at my gateway eero that plugs into the switch there, and is connnected to the coax cable from a previous cable TV installation. MoCA is transparent to your router, it's only a layer 2 transport protocol, and you need an adapter at each endpoint (point of use). Okay, well, layer 2 devices like MoCA 2.0 adapters don't have IP addresses, unless they have something additional built in that needs an IP address.