Wireless Internet connections are convenient, but they are also notoriously unreliable. Nothing drives this point home more than a glitchy video conference, especially if it’s tied to a crucial business meeting.
The solution, of course, is to connect your home office to a wired network. 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 is important if you regularly share large files or participate in high-quality video meetings, or even (ahem) play games.
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Setting up a permanent wired connection is easier said than done. Even if you own your own home, running 50 or 100 feet of Ethernet cable is a complicated and expensive job. If you live and work in a rented house or apartment, forget about cutting holes in 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 was in the living room, offering gigabit downloads. My office was at the other end of the house, with Wi-Fi signals that were depressingly weak, thanks to the brick walls. I didn’t have Ethernet jacks anywhere in my house, but there were cable jacks in every room. That was what unlocked the solution to my bandwidth dilemma.
These cable outlets were originally installed to make it easy to connect TVs in every room. It turns out that the coaxial cable connecting those outlets is also capable of carrying Internet signals, thanks to a technology called MoCA (Multimedia alliance over coaxial cable). The latest revision of this technology, MoCA 2.5, supports speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps.
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My wiring was over 20 years old, but it was capable of reliably transmitting a 1 Gbps signal over 100 feet. In a very old house with extremely outdated coax cable, you might have problems.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 jack. To take advantage of that existing coaxial cable, you need a MoCA adapter on each end of the connection. That adapter is a simple box that has two connectors on the back: one for a coaxial cable and the other for an RJ45 Ethernet plug.
With this MoCA adapter, you can create a high-speed wired Internet connection.
Ed Bott/ZDNET
I was lucky because my Xfinity Cable Modem compatible with MoCA technology directly. As a result, I only needed one adapter for my office PC. I chose the Trendnet TMO-312C MoCA 2.5 Ethernet over Coax Adapterin the image above. After connecting the adapter to my home office cable outlet using a very short length 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 plug into an Ethernet port on the cable modem/gateway. If you have multiple cable outlets in your home or office, you can add a MoCA adapter to each one, and you can connect any Ethernet-compatible device to that adapter—a PC, Mac, or smart TV, for example.
You can even use this technology in combination with a Wi-Fi network to add a Wi-Fi hotspot in a basement, attic, or other location that’s too far 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 onto the cable at the point where it enters the house, before it reaches the cable modem or any MoCA adapters. It prevents network signals from leaving the home network (helping to keep communications secure) and also improves performance by reflecting RF signals above 1 GHz back into the home network. I used this one Belden POE Filteravailable on Amazon for under $10.
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MoCA technology is a great alternative to standard Ethernet cabling and costs a tiny fraction of what you would have to pay to install dedicated Ethernet cabling in your home. It’s an option worth considering when Wi-Fi just can’t get from point A to point B.