MoCA or Powerline? (newb)

[stevech]

Most cable TV Set-top boxes have MoCA built-in. Deactivated unless you pay for whole-house-DVR. It's how they access a central DVR from many disk-less set-top boxes. I think FIOS uses MoCA for the indoor distrib.
But that's not retail/consumer.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, FIOS is MoCA ONLY for their DVRs. Kind of annoys the heck out of me as their DVRs have had ethernet ports for ages, but according to Verizon they cannot be enabled. PERIOD. Theirs aren't simply for whole house DVR, it is how they get guide and VOD data from the internet.

 

[KenAF]

Those are Fast Ethernet only. Doing more reading, supposedly MoCA 1.1 has 170Mbps net yield...though I don't know that you'd ever see that. With my ECB2500 I can get around 90Mbps payload, probably close to 100Mbps net yield when you factor in overhead.

The only way the ECB3500 could get anything like 170Mbps net is if there were multiple sources hitting it, as each ethernet port is limited to 100Mbps max. Of course, that just might happen and nice to know that MoCA actually should be able to do closer to 170Mbps.

In theory. I wonder what it can really do in practice and how much of the 170Mbps is L2 overhead on coax (Wireless has around 40% L2 overhead for error correction and stuff. I'd assume powerline is pretty similar...plus that is a damned noisy environment. I'd think with Coax being quieter L2 overhead might be substantially less as there wouldn't need to be as much error correction, nor retransmits).

There are at least two MoCA 1.1 devices with gigabit Ethernet ports -- Actiontec MI-424WR revisions G and I. All prior versions of the MI-424WR have 100Mbps ports. With MI-424WR revisions I and G, usable MoCA throughput is 18 megabytes per second (equivalent to ~150Mbps) through the gigabit ports, up from 9-10 megabytes per second on the earlier revisions with 100Mbps ports.

In my home, I have one MI-424WR rev. I downstairs and another upstairs, bridged, which enables me to copy files and perform backups at 18 megabytes per second. I am able to browse the Internet at a full 150Mbps (with 150Mbps FiOS Internet service) in both locations. I am also able to download high-definition recordings from my TiVo Roamio, which has a built-in MoCA 1.1 interface, to my PC at 12-15 megabytes per second (TiVo is the limiting factor, in this case).

The wireless coverage on the Actiontec MI-424WR is poor, so I disabled that functionality and use them exclusively in bridge mode. For routing and wireless coverage, I have an Asus N66U.

 

[azazel1024]

Interesting. It almost makes me sad that the ECB2500 is fast ethernet only, though I don't really have a use case for anything other than as a basic bridge for my DVR to get guide/VOD and a single DVR only, so it doesn't really stress things. One of these day's I'd like to play with port limiting through my switch to see where it chokes, but my guess is even with VOD it probably isn't using much over 1MB/sec.