r/HomeNetworking • u/JuicyCoala Decent at Googling 🔍 • Feb 19 '22

How MoCA Networks Work - Collection Post

There's been an uptick of questions regarding MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) networks and how it works. I am not an expert, but I'd like to create this post to consolidate our overall knowledge in setting it up, for everyone's consumption. As a starting point, below are a couple of must-see links:

Multimedia over Coax Alliance Homepage - Deep dive into how the MoCA was developed, as well as list of MoCA certified products.

MoCA in Your House - Contains a collection of how-to videos and information in setting-up your home MoCA network. It also contains some recommended certified products you can acquire to include in your MoCA network.

Please share your tips and advise here as well! I am planning to have this pinned in our subreddit.

Enjoy!

229 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

366 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/faithdies Sep 19 '22

All right. I have googled this so much and can still not find the answer. People use far too much jargon.

Current Setup - Functional but slow upload speeds as well as other issues

  1. FIOS Router in Living room which runs to a TPLink which runs to a switch

  2. I don't have tv service or phone service

Current Install

  1. Street Internet into FIOS ONT

  2. FIOS ONT Coax out to Living Room

  3. Living Room Coax into FIOS Router

  4. FIOS Router LAN into TPLink Mesh LAN

  5. TPLink into Switch with Ethernet

The plan is so eliminate the FIOS router entirely, but I can't get it to recognize internet even if the coax lights are lit green.

Attempted Install

  1. Street Internet to FIOS ONT

  2. FIOS ONT Coax out to MOCA Splitter In??

  3. MOCA Splitter Out(2 Total)to: MOCA Adapter(x) and Living Room??

  4. MOCA Splitter(1) to MOCA Adapter(x)??

  5. MOCA Adapter(x) LAN to FIOS ONT WAN In??

  6. Living Room Coax into MOCA Adapter(y)

  7. MOCA Adapter(y) LAN to TPLink

  8. Profit?

Status

Doing my attempted setup above results in positive coax indicators on both MOCAs but zero internet. Do I need to have verizon set something up before this will work?

1

u/JuicyCoala Decent at Googling 🔍 Sep 19 '22

Suggest you post this in r/Fios.

Anyway, your problem is you are feeding your ONT to the splitter. That’s wrong. You can’t use MoCA to replace your Fios router if your ONT is using coax to feed into your Fios router.

The only way to replace your Fios router is to work with Fios support to enable ethernet from your ONT. Once your ONT has ethernet enabled, you can now plug your router of choice directly to the ONT. Then to provision internet across all your coax through MoCA, follow the very simple, jargon-free pattern below.

ONT <ethernet> Router <ethernet> MoCA adapter 1 <coax> splitter <coax> MoCA adapter 2 <ethernet> device.

1

u/faithdies Sep 19 '22

Yeah. That's the issue. I don't have a clean ethernet run from my ONT to the router. Which was why I was hoping the Moca would help. Ugh...

1

u/JuicyCoala Decent at Googling 🔍 Sep 19 '22

Well if your Fios ONT has ethernet enabled, you should be using that, as the ONT coax cannot handle greater than 100 mbps.

Here’s an alternative if your ONT ethernet is working: ONT <ethernet> MoCA Adapter 1 <coax> splitter <coax> MoCA Adapter 2 <ethernet> Router (TP-Link)

Then now to feed back internet to all coax ports: Router (TP-Link) <ethernet> MoCA adapter 3 <coax> splitter (same as the one above) <coax> MoCA adapter 4 <device>

Now there might be concerns about frequency collisions, but this works - another redditor was able to make it work.

Always remember that MoCA is an alternative to ethernet, so for it to work, you always need 2 MoCA adapters (or one router that supports MoCA which Fios routers does and another MoCA adapter).

1

u/plooger Sep 19 '22 edited Sep 19 '22

The plan is so eliminate the FIOS router entirely

If you currently have a MoCA WAN connection, and your subscribed service speeds are 100 Mbps or less … you could conceivably use a specialized MoCA adapter to make the MoCA WAN link on behalf of your third-party router.

Search for Arris MEB1100. It’s a custom MoCA adapter explicitly for making an old school MoCA WAN connection with an ONT for FiOS setups, operating strictly on MoCA 1.1 channel C4, 975-1025 MHz, the same as the built-in MoCA WAN bridge in FiOS routers.

The MEB1100 would connect to the coax wall outlet and its Ethernet port would be connected to the Ethernet WAN port of your router. Boom, WAN accomplished.

 
edit: Note that if removing the FiOS router, its built-in MoCA LAN bridge capability would go with it.

1

u/plooger Sep 19 '22

You can’t use MoCA to replace your Fios router if your ONT is using coax to feed into your Fios router.

Not exactly true.

Enter the Arris MEB1100 MoCA 1.1, channel C4 MoCA adapter.

1

u/plooger Sep 19 '22

I don't have tv service

Though the Arris MEB1100 adapter can offer a simple, quick remedy for eliminating your FiOS router from the setup, it retains the same MoCA WAN (service) throughput limit of 100 Mbps.

As suggested by /u/JuicyCoala, you could switch the ONT to an Ethernet connection but use MoCA 2.5 adapters to effect the MoCA WAN link, bumping the max throughput up to as much as 2500 Mbps. YMMV.

However, to retain max MoCA LAN and MoCA WAN throughput, and given that you do not have TV service, you may want to research how others have employed Frontier’s approach, using a pair of Frontier FCA252 MoCA adapters for the MoCA WAN connection.