Considering MOCA

[Gronnie]

Hi, I'm considering MOCA because wireless isn't working in some areas of my house very well and I was told running ethernet in my house was not very feasible. I have a couple of questions:

1. Will it interfere with my whole house DVRs from Charter?
2. I have 100 Mbps internet. How much will Moca slow me down? Is there a way for it to not slow down the computers not connected by Moca?

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

I used a pair of Netgear MoCA boxes in my old house, which was wired with RG59 coax but not Cat5 or better Ethernet. The MoCA boxes worked perfectly. Once set up and deployed, I never needed to think about them again. They just worked.

They will not interfere with cable TV. They automatically find unused bandwidth on your coax. They are not compatible with satellite TV.

I don't think they'll slow you down at all. Running speed tests, I got the same speed over MoCA as I did via Cat5e.

 

[stevech]

Hi, I'm considering MOCA because wireless isn't working in some areas of my house very well and I was told running ethernet in my house was not very feasible. I have a couple of questions:

1. Will it interfere with my whole house DVRs from Charter?
2. I have 100 Mbps internet. How much will Moca slow me down? Is there a way for it to not slow down the computers not connected by Moca?

Good question, since whole-house DVRs normally use MoCA.
The old D-Link MoCA I have has a setup utility to mitigate conflicting frequency ranges between the D-Links and satellite on cable, and perhaps too it would deal with the whole-house DVR. I recall too that there was a manual frequency range setting via that admin software.. presuming you can know the freq. range used by the DVR's MoCA if your MoCA doesn't report such after doing a survey.

My MoCA delivers 70Mbps net yield. Wired 100Bt ethernet net yield is about 90Mbps, depending on the kinds of PCs and other devices used.

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

The Netgear boxes are "frequency agile", automatically seeking out unused frequency ranges on the coax. It's been a long time since I set up my pair, but I don't recall any manual settings to avoid certain ranges. I'm sure the user manual can be found online, though.

 

[Gronnie]

I think I'm going to give it a shot.

What retailer probably has the best return policy in case it doesn't work out, probably Amazon?

 

[stevech]

newegg is customer friendly.
Fry's if there's one near you - never balked for me.

Probably cheaper on-line - or print it out and get brick-and-mortar retailer to price match.

 

[shrike4242]

I've used MoCA with Charter for multiple years, though without their DVR service. Never been an issue with anything in the house, though I'm only getting about 60-65Mbps speeds.

I would recommend if you do get MoCA, make sure Charter has a powered amplifier in your house from your cable tap to all of the outlets, so you don't have any signal loss. Also, a privacy filter between the amplifier and the cable feed into your house would also be a good idea so you don't have your data leaking back upstream from your residence.

 

[Gronnie]

Just wanted to update that I bought 4 of the Actiontec adapters and they work great. Split the cable at each of my 3 TVs as well as at the modem with a splitter, no interference with cable box or multi-room DVR. I thought I was going to have to change all the splitters the cable company had used as they weren't high frequency, but surprisingly everything works fine.

 

[stevech]

Good to hear!
Mine's been running for 2 years.
It in the forgotten gizmo category. Just works.