Wireless Internet connections are convenient, but also notoriously unreliable. Nothing proves that point more emphatically than a glitchy video conference, especially if it’s related to a crucial business meeting.
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The solution, of course, is to establish a wired network connection to your home office. Wi-Fi is great for mobility, but a wired connection offers many advantages when it comes to working from home. It’s faster and more reliable, with lower latency, all of which matters if you regularly share large files, participate in high-quality video meetings, or even (ahem) play games.
Setting up a full-time wired connection is easier said than done. Even if you own a home, running 50 to 100 feet of Ethernet cable is a messy, expensive job. If you live and work in a rental house or apartment, forget about drilling holes in walls and ceilings.
Fortunately, there is a solution, as I discovered a few years ago when I moved to a loft-style apartment. My router was in the living room and served gigabit downloads. My office was on the other side of the house, where the Wi-Fi signals were depressingly weak thanks to brick walls. I didn’t have Ethernet connections anywhere in my house, but every room had cable connections. That’s what opened up the solution to my bandwidth dilemma.
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These cable outlets were originally installed to make it easy to connect television sets in any room. However, the coaxial cable connecting these outlets can also transmit Internet signals, thanks to a technology called MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance). The latest version of this technology, MoCA 2.5, supports speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps.
Let me emphasize that fact. I didn’t have an Ethernet cable running from room to room, but I had a coaxial cable that could carry just as much bandwidth. That cable wiring was more than twenty years old, but could reliably carry a 1 Gbps signal over 100 feet. In a very old house with an extremely outdated coaxial cable, you may encounter problems. But if your cable is good enough to carry HDTV signals, it’s probably capable of running a modern network.
Of course, you can’t plug an Ethernet cable directly into a cable outlet. To use that existing coaxial cable, a MoCA adapter is required at each end of the connection. That adapter is a simple box with two connectors on the back: one for a coaxial cable and the other for an RJ45 Ethernet plug.
With a MoCA adapter like this one you can create a wired, high-speed Internet connection.
Ed Bott/ZDNET
I was lucky because my Xfinity Cable Modem directly supports MoCA technology. As a result, I only needed an adapter for my office PC. I chose the Trendnet TMO-312C Ethernet over coax MoCA 2.5 adapterpictured above. After connecting the adapter to the cable outlet in my home office with a very short coaxial cable, I connected it to the Gigabit Ethernet port of my home office PC with a standard Cat 6 cable.
But everything would have been fine if I had had a fiber optic connection for the internet. It doesn’t matter how the Internet gets to your home or office, because that access point usually includes a router to which you can connect three or more RJ45 connectors.
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If your internet comes in through a cable modem, check to see if MoCA is supported directly. If not. You will need a cable splitter and a second MoCA adapter to connect to an Ethernet port on the cable modem/gateway. If your internet comes in through fiber optic or another non-cable option, you can also use a MoCA adapter to turn the cable outlet at that intersection into an endpoint on your network.
If you have multiple cable connections at home or in the office, you can plug a MoCA adapter into each wall outlet, and you can connect any Ethernet-compatible device to that adapter, such as a PC, a Mac, or a 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 is too far from the primary access point to get a reliable signal to get.
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 home – before it reaches the cable modem or MoCA adapters. It blocks network signals from leaving your home network (keeping your communications secure) and also improves performance by reflecting radio frequency signals above 1 GHz back to the home network. I used this Called POE filteravailable from Amazon for less than $10.
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MoCA technology is a great alternative to standard Ethernet wiring, and it costs a small fraction of what you would have to pay to retrofit dedicated Ethernet cabling in your home. It’s a worthwhile option to consider if Wi-Fi simply can’t get from point A to point B.
This article was originally published on May 23, 2022 and last updated on October 14, 2024.
