Getting the keys for your first home is quite something. There's one thing about renting your home and not really being able to do much in terms of improvements or DIY to stay within the confines of a tenancy agreement, but all the restrictions are lifted with your own brick and mortar. That's when you can really create something special when it comes to the home local area network (LAN). There are some potential concerns, however. Depending on the property, your options for wiring up the home could be limited. Ours was with an old English cottage.

Solid stone walls don't play well with cable management, especially if you wish to hide the wires, as it would involve a considerable amount of work. The only other way would be to do some external work or use trunking inside to try and hide everything as much as possible. But there's a third option: Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA). Most homes have coaxial cabling for TV, and many homes (like ours) have connections between rooms, which is where MoCA adapters come into play. Instead of going DIY for months, hiring a professional to fish cables through walls, or relying on Wi-Fi, MoCA can lend a hand with specific routes.

MoCA can provide safe routes

No drilling, no mess

MoCA promises Ethernet speeds and latency without needing to run dedicated data cables everywhere. This is incredibly handy if you have coax cabling between rooms, as we do for the living room to the secondary bedroom. It can revolutionize the LAN, allowing you to reach places with cabling that you'd otherwise put off due to building or time constraints. It's so obvious now that we're using it too, why shouldn't we be able to use coaxial cabling for Ethernet? It's copper, insulated, shielded, and ready to go. So long as your home has had cable or satellite TV in the past, you're effectively good to go.

If you're not actively using your old coaxial cabling for TV, it's essentially wasted bandwidth, but there's an easy way to use it as part of your LAN backbone. MoCA isn't slow either. With the right cabling quality and kit, you could enjoy up to 2.5 Gbps with MoCA 2.5, the latest available standard. This is faster than most LANs of today and has ample bandwidth for linking together network switch nodes for gaming, video streaming, and transferring huge files. The best part? It's all low latency, just as you'd expect from Ethernet.

It works a little like power line adapters, but instead of using copper wiring for your electrics, we're using dedicated links not shared with anything else. All that's required is a MoCA adapter for each room that needs linking, and it's ready for network traffic. What's more is that you can actually source MoCA kits that handle Power over Ethernet (PoE), so these can be used to send data and power to devices like access points, which is precisely what we did with our link between the two rooms. It's worth shopping around for the right solution for your home, but here's a great example.

Setting up MoCA is easy

Creating a truly hybrid network

The process of creating a MoCA network link was painless and straightforward. What's more is that you don't necessarily have to sacrifice much to enjoy using this technology within the home. Need PoE? That's supported by some kits. Want faster speeds? That's possible too. All we needed was the purchase of two MoCA 2.5 adapters. We opted for two KB-M3-03 units from Kiwee Broadband. These are superb with 2.5GbE support and 30W of PoE+, which makes it ideal for hooking up everything from security cameras to access points. We have an AP configured in the room, and using just an Ethernet cable from the MoCA adapter allows it to be mounted for maximum signal strength.

One of the two adapters went into the living room, which hooked up to the existing network switch. The second was added to the upstairs bedroom where the coaxial connection terminated, allowing us to expand wireless coverage within the home without drilling a single hole in the home — my spouse was elated to see the loosely hanging Ethernet link removed from the staircase. All that was required was a power outlet upstairs to handle PoE injection, and we were good to go. As soon as the connection was established, it was just like using Ethernet.

The best part about MoCA is that the technology utilizes existing cabling, allowing you to fully utilize all infrastructure within the home. Coaxial cables are typically used only for TV signals and are often sitting dormant in many homes, unused by the majority of people. MoCA adapts the existing network to allow it to function as a high-speed Ethernet backbone without disrupting any of the other services already using it. There's no interference as you'd often see using electrical circuits, and you can even use the same coax link for both TV and network data. Different frequency bands are used, so it shouldn't cause any problems.

But it's not as good as Ethernet

We've since replaced the coaxial setup with Ethernet links because using coax adapters like these has some drawbacks. To start with, you're adding more devices onto the network that require power and could end up failing. A single Ethernet link between switches is easily replaced and should outlast electrical equipment. Then there's the fact that not every home has coax links between rooms. It's usually a single entry point from an external source, such as a satellite dish. That's where MoCA doesn't really make sense, and it's absolutely not a solution for every house.

But as a stopgap or a solution where all the planets align, MoCA adapters can be incredibly handy at providing low latency and high bandwidth between rooms.