Sorely disappointed this wasn't about 10base5.
No mention of frozen garden hose in the title should have given it away.
Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#42My old apartment had coax cables in the office I used. My old apartment was also an old home with a TON of interference, making WiFi travel terribly.
I did my research, bought moca adapters, and set everything up. As it turned out, the coax cables upstairs in the office... weren't plugged into anything.
I ended up just buying a flat ethernet cable and 3m strips. I put it all around the trim and both my wife and I are pretty short - so no one ever saw it. It went to a POE AP in the office.
I now own an old home. I was excited to see a bunch of coax outside, but alas, previous homeowners have either pulled out all the old coax or snipped it. There still are old holes everywhere from the coax - so hopefully one day I'll be able to snake an ethernet cable through and get an AP up.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#43Sorely disappointed this wasn't about 10base5.
Yeah, my first thought was also along the lines of "well yeah that's just ethernet"; I figured somebody hit a use case where the older physical wiring was easier to use:)
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#44AIUI 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…
The average latency for MoCA 2 devices is 3.5ms which is half what you say the "minimum latency" is. The latency on my WiFi averages 7ms. So it's likely going to be better than a WiFi connection.
My MoCA devices don't use crazy amounts of electricity either.
It could also depend on where you are. In the US, homes often have quite good coax wiring. That might not be the case in many parts of the world.
> I'd much prefer a consistent
Honestly, this just feels like FUD. You've made up a scenario with latency numbers that are wrong claiming with zero support or evidence that a neighbor boiling their kettle will make a connection bad. It sounds like you briefly looked at MoCA, never tried it, but formed a very strong opinion about it based on basically nothing.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#45I bet there was something physically wrong with the cat5 wiring as the actual reason it couldn't do gigabit.
My best anecdote on that is when an Ethernet wallplug was punched down with a flat screwdriver... which worked as hardware firewall for the SMB traffic. Everything else worked fine: ICMP, HTTP/S... but not SMB. After I re-punched it with a proner Krone it started work fine for the SMB traffic just fine.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#46I bet there was something physically wrong with the cat5 wiring as the actual reason it couldn't do gigabit.
Yep, I had a cable that was working at gigabit, until it was pinched by a door and bent really hard. Then it started working at 100 MBPS.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#47Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#48AIUI 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…
The average latency for MoCA 2 devices is 3.5ms which is half what you say the "minimum latency" is. The latency on my WiFi averages 7ms. So it's likely going to be better than a WiFi connection. My MoCA devices don't use crazy amounts of electricity either. It could also depend on where you are. In the US, homes often have quite good coax wiring. That might not be the case in many parts of the world. > I'd much pref…
> but formed a very strong opinion about it based on basically nothing.
3.5 ms is between 5x - 53x worse than what you'd see out of gigabit ethernet, depending on the quality of the equipment, but even at the low end this is absolutely something noticeable in any application heavy on round-trips (such as those mentioned). Nothing breaks my focus more quickly than an unpredictably slow or janky UI, it is far from a made up scenario, just open an explorer window pointing at an SMB share with a few hundred JPEGs with uncached thumbnails and you've already hit it. I'd much prefer consistency of a slower network than usability that evaporates at random, else what is the point of preferring a wired network over wireless in the first place?
FWIW, listing a directory or opening a single file over SMB is at least 4 round-trips, that's 14 ms burned on lag just for a single thumbnail, in the best case, and it only multiplies from there.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#49AIUI 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…
Umm, what? MoCa devices are very small and use negligible power. They also introduce far less latency than WiFi.
Re: Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. All true. I just hate the coax in my house. It pisses me off every time I see there they installed it by just drilling a hole in the facade.
I bought a house in a locality that requires conduit for all in-wall wiring (including low voltage) by code. This annoys most people, but I love it since it means you can upgrade stuff easily in the future if you desire. This house did not have cat5 installed anywhere, but it had both coax and cat3 for the old school phone lines/intercom system. During the inspection I removed some wall plates and noted that there in…
> The builder had decided to cheat the code inspectors by installing every single box with only about a foot of conduit attached to the boxes. After that they simply stapled the wiring to the studs every so often making pulling cable with them impossible. At least it appears they did indeed use conduit for the AC power.
Did you have any recourse against the builder? Maybe through your homeowner's insurance?