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Equipment advice for FiOS & MoCA setup

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hypnotoad

New Around Here
Hi guys, apologies if this isn't the right section.

I'm closing on a three story home (garage & finished half basement, first floor, second floor) just under 3000Sqft including the garage.

I have a Verizon Fios Arris 1000GJ4-2G-VZ ONT bringing fiber into the garage, and the building has 9 homerun RG-6 coax cables terminating next to the ONT from upstairs.

I was initially set on using the coax to pull Cat-6 cables but quickly learned about the possibility of them being stapled to studs as well as the ability to use moca adapters to get similar speeds. After some research I was set on going the mesh route with a pair of Asus ZenWifi AX(CT8)'s one in the living room on the first floor, and one upstairs, and backhauling them with the coax cables using moca adapters. Turns out I need to connect the ONT directly to a router via ethernet to get gigabit speeds, which means I would either have to get a third AX Mesh router for the garage or find a more affordable Asus router than can work seamlessly with the wired mesh routers. This is a basic network drawing I made.

The additional cost of a router has me second guessing my plan and I'm looking for other options that I should research. I don't have too many devices to connect and mainly looking for speed, coverage, and a unified control interface.

I could go with a Unifi dream machine and a pair of flex HD's but I'm hearing that their range may not be as good as the CT8's and I would need POE injectors and deal with the cabling mess (not to mention the cost)

I may also save by going with 3 Zenwifi AC units and upgrading once wifi 6 becomes more mature.

Any other options I should be looking into?

Thank you!
 
Do you plan to run CATV or video on the RG6 or can some or all the RG6 drops be used for data only?

If you don't need to share the coaxial with video then you can look at a media converters which will let you run Ethernet using coaxial. They are much less expensive than MOCA adapters and you would think they would be more reliable since they don't have to share bandwidth. The last time I looked you could pick up a media converter pair for US$20.
 
No plans to sign up for video, we cut cable years ago.

Are Moca converters basically media converters that also allow video?
 
i use a pair of Gocoax moca 2.5 modems on coax between the ONT and the ATT router to maintain full Gbit/sec speed up/down. For my APs (cisco 371)i used AT6200 bonded moca 2 modems as i do not need full Gbit/s bidirectional through the APs. All coax are dedicated runs in a star configuration and no sharing with other moca nodes through a splitter. The star is formed using a Gigabit switch on the ethernet side of the network.

moca runs at frequencies above cable TV and Doccis 3.0 allowing sharingof the same cable. If Doccis 3.1 is used, then the lower two channels (of 5 ) used by moca 2.5 are in conflict and are lost for use reducing the bandwidth back to near moca 2 bonded.

i have OTA tv signal running over several of the same cables that services my APs by using a splitter on the cable from the antenna and connecting to the TV/out on the moca modems. Works great.
 
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No plans to sign up for video, we cut cable years ago.

Are Moca converters basically media converters that also allow video?
MOCA allows cable or satellite to be transmitted simultaneously over the same cable with data. Media converters enable you to transmit data including streaming videos over coaxial cable then convert it back to Ethernet at the ends.

Here is a link to a gig rated adapter.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MRV4WA1/?tag=snbforums-20

100 Mbps adapters are much less.
 
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Hi @hypnotoad. Welcome to SNB.

If the 9 coax runs appear original (GC-installed), they're probably stapled. I would test one and see. If they're pull-able, I'd replace with solid-core Cat6 UTP 23AWG.

Presuming the coax stays put, you'll need to do EoC/DeCa or MoCa. EoC/DeCa adapters may be cheaper, but most are only 100Mb simplex (DeCa is 200Mb duplex aggregate) and some will carry PoE, but caution, some won't pass multicast. MoCa 2.5 will pass multicast and do 2.5Gb/s aggregate across all adapters on the same broadcast domain (ie. cable splitter). Best bang are probably GoCoax WF-803M's. Any way you go, you can at least built a wired backbone, which is a very good thing.

As for the logical network, the "easy button" might be consumer mesh, but with an all-wired backbone, depending on how much fronthaul capacity you want, proper APs may be the better call -- AFAIK, all consumer mesh products force all nodes to use the same fronthaul channel in both bands, regardless of node count, even with wired backhaul present, so you're capped to a single channel's worth of airtime availability and throughput across the entire house. If you don't have that many devices or that much throughput to move, perhaps not a big deal. But if you truly want as seamless an experience as possible, I'd go back to considering SMB-grade, discrete components, and for the single control plane, either an all-UniFi or all-Omada stack.

So that's the way I'd approach this. Happy to help further if you want.
 

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