Wireless internet connections are convenient, but they are also notoriously unreliable. Nothing proves that more than a failed video conference call, especially when it involves an important business meeting.
The obvious solution is to run a wired network connection to your home office. Wi-Fi is great for mobility, but a wired connection offers many advantages when working from home. It’s faster and more reliable, with lower latency, all of which are important if you regularly share large files or participate in high-quality video meetings, or even (well) play games.
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Setting up a full-time wired connection is easier said than done. Even if you own your own home, running 50 or 100 feet of Ethernet cable is a messy and expensive task. If you live and work in a rented house or apartment, forget about punching holes in the walls and ceilings.
Fortunately, there is a solution, as I discovered a few years ago when I moved into a loft apartment. The cable modem is in the living room, providing gigabit downloads. My office is at the other end of the house, with a woefully weak Wi-Fi signal due to the brick walls. I don’t have Ethernet jacks anywhere in the house, but every room has cable outlets. That’s the solution to my bandwidth dilemma.
These cable outlets were originally installed to make it convenient to hook up a television in every room. However, the coaxial cable connecting those outlets can also carry an internet signal, thanks to a technology called MoCA (MoMultimedia via Coax Alliance). The latest version of this technology, MoCA 2.5, supports speeds up to 2.5 Gbps.
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My cabling is over 20 years old, but it’s capable of reliably running a 1 Gbps signal over 100 feet. In a very old house with extremely outdated coaxial cabling, you might have trouble. But if your cabling is good enough to run an HDTV signal, it’s probably capable of running a modern network.
Of course, you can’t plug an Ethernet cable directly into a cable outlet. Using existing coaxial cable requires a MoCA adapter at each end of the connection. That adapter is a simple box with two connectors on the back — one for coaxial cable, one for RJ45 Ethernet plugs.
Using this MoCA adapter, you can create a high-speed wired internet connection.
Ed Bott/ZDNET
I was lucky because Xfinity Cable Modem supports MoCA technology directly. Therefore, I only need one adapter for my office PC. I chose Trendnet TMO-312C MoCA 2.5 Ethernet over Coaxial Converterimage above. After connecting the adapter to a cable outlet in my home office with a very short piece of coaxial cable, I connected it to the Gigabit Ethernet port on my home office PC using a standard Cat 6 cable.
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If your cable modem doesn’t support MoCA directly, you’ll need a cable splitter and a second MoCA adapter to connect to the Ethernet port on your cable modem/gateway. If you have multiple cable outlets in your home or office, you can add a MoCA adapter to each outlet, and you can plug any Ethernet-compatible device into that adapter — like a PC, Mac, or smart TV.
You can even use this technology in conjunction with a Wi-Fi network to add a Wi-Fi access point in a basement, attic, or other location that’s too far away from the main access point to get a reliable signal.
One final addition I recommend on any MoCA network is a POE (Point of Entry) filter. This small device screws into the cable at the point where it enters the house, before the cable reaches the cable modem or any MoCA adapters. It blocks network signals from leaving your home network (keeping your communications safe) and also improves performance by reflecting radio frequency signals above 1 GHz back into your home network. I used Belden POE FilterAvailable on Amazon for under $10.
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MoCA technology is a great alternative to standard Ethernet wiring and costs a fraction of what it would cost to install dedicated Ethernet cabling in your home. It’s a great option when Wi-Fi can’t get from Point A to Point B.
This article was originally published on May 23, 2022 and was last updated on September 13, 2024.
