RF IF modulation will always be more spectrally efficient than baseband modulation all things held equal. Especially at the low end of the DC->whatever range. RF is just more computationally/electrically expensive.
Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have ancient coax in the US on my house built in the 70s, leading to syncing at lower bandwidth often on my moca, sometimes as low as 100Mb. Luckily it runs outside the house, so at some point I’ll replace it with newer cable and actually get the theoretical 2.5 Gb.
If you're replacing the cable, you may as well install an ethernet cable.
Or fiber if you don't care for poe
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#33Funny, literally just bought one of these for an htpc in a noisy wifi environment with a cable run but no Ethernet
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#34Just got some MoCA adapters, & they've been great. Not quite gigabit speed, but the ones I got only go to 1 or 2.5 if there are only two, while we have three in place. It's made the whole house much more usable — older houses & WiFi don't always mix. If there's a run already in place, it's definitely worth trying out.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#35I bet there was something physically wrong with the cat5 wiring as the actual reason it couldn't do gigabit.
Regular cat5 is only rated at 100mbit. 5e will handle gigabit, and I've seen 5 work for short runs too.
GigE works totally fine on bog standard 25 year old Cat5 over 100s of ft.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#36I put Coax and Ethernet all over my house with the idea of doing MoCA or whatever else I could with it - right now its feeding an FM Modulator into my coax system.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#37I bet there was something physically wrong with the cat5 wiring as the actual reason it couldn't do gigabit.
Regular cat5 is only rated at 100mbit. 5e will handle gigabit, and I've seen 5 work for short runs too.
The spec for older ethernet standards is with 100 meters of cabling with most of it un dense conduit. You can get away with lesser cable when runs are shorter and not in dense conduit. I had a run of mixed cat5e and cat3 that did gigE just fine. I'm not sure I've ever seen actual cat5 in the wild, but from what I've heard, most cat5 will test to cat5e spec too.
I have 10g-base-t running reliably on cat5e as well. (30ish meters)
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#38AIUI the minimum latency on these is always measured in milliseconds, with 6-7ms apparently commonplace, which you're going to immediately feel using e.g. a block or network storage protocol. No references, but did look at moca for exactly the same reason a few months back. The physical size of the models I looked at also suggested you'd want to check power consumption before stuffing a home full of them - custom dev…
If you’re not using any splitters and zero to a few couplers you can expect latency to be ~3ms with the model OP is using. You can easily achieve 1Gbps using NFS with 3-10ms of latency as long as the underlying hardware can support it. I would avoid doing block storage even over ethernet though, that should be reserved for DAC or fiber. These particular adapters are rated for 10W (5V/2A) and I doubt they use all of t…
Moca is a fantastic option if you have a good quality coax run, ideally point to point without splitters. For example a lot of people at some point pulled coax from wherever the cable enters the house to their living room. Now when you get fiber, the fiber probably enters the house in the same spot as the coax does. You can repurpose the coax run to keep your media center hardwired, as a wifi backhaul, etc. and in those use cases (streaming, wifi, etc) the additional 5ms of latency are IMHO irrelevant. Of course, if you can run a new cable with ease, nothing will beat high quality Cat 6. A lot of us just don't have that options, lack of crawl space or attic, etc.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#39Sorely disappointed this wasn't about 10base5.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#40I have tried MOCA, but it runs at higher frequencies than cheap European coaxial was designed for (lower frequencies for terrestrial television) and had stability/performance issues due to this. There's an alternative called G.hn over Coaxial, that runs at 100-200Mhz which seems to fair much better on crappy coaxial, at the cost of max bandwidth (500Mbps-1000Mbps) and harder to get hardware. The manufactures of G.hn2…
G.hn also is available as a power line technology too.
I'd used HomePlug powerline for years in various houses/apartments. Some links would be 150Mb/s, others struggled to keep 20Mb/s, depending.
I had high hopes G.hn2 was going to be a lot better, but both Nexuslink & Comtrend 2Gb/s failed to make a significant difference for me versus the HomePlug, still usually under 40Mb/s. That house had particularly bad wiring it seems.
Dedicated coax could be way better. Interesting to hear a moca failed story! I didn't consider that as a possibility.