Wireless internet connections are convenient, but they’re also notoriously unreliable. Nothing proves this more than a faulty video conference, especially when it’s connected to an important business meeting.
The solution, of course, is to create a wired network connection to your home office. Wi-Fi is great for mobility, but a wired connection offers many advantages when working from home. It’s faster, more reliable, and has lower latency, all of which matter if you regularly share large files, participate in high-quality video conferences, or even (ahem) play games.
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But setting up a permanent wired connection is easier said than done. Even if you own your own home, running a 15 or 30 meter Ethernet cable is a messy and expensive business. And if you live and work in a rental house or apartment, you can forget about drilling holes in walls and ceilings.
Fortunately, there is a solution, as I discovered a few years ago when I moved into a loft-style condo. The cable modem was in the living room and enabled gigabit downloads. My office was at the other end of the house, and thanks to the brick walls, the Wi-Fi signal was depressingly weak. I had no Ethernet jacks anywhere in my house, but there were cable outlets in every room. And that was the solution to my bandwidth dilemma.
These cable ports were – originally – installed to conveniently connect televisions in every room. As it turns out, the coaxial cable connecting these ports can also carry 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.
Of course, you can’t plug an Ethernet cable directly into a cable outlet. To use the existing coaxial cable, a MoCA adapter is required at each end of the connection. This adapter is a simple box with two ports on the back – one for a coaxial cable, the other for an RJ45 Ethernet plug.
This MoCA adapter allows you to create a high-speed wired Internet connection.
Ed Bott/ZDNET
I was lucky because my Xfinity Cable Modem supports MoCA technology directly. Therefore, I only needed an adapter for my office PC. I chose the Trendnet TMO-312C Ethernet Over Coax MoCA 2.5 Adaptersee image 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 on my home office PC with a standard Cat-6 cable.
If your cable modem doesn’t support MoCA directly, you’ll need a cable splitter and a second MoCA adapter to connect to 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 connect any Ethernet-compatible device to that adapter—such as a PC, Mac, or smart TV.
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You can even use this technology in combination with a Wi-Fi network to add a Wi-Fi access point in a basement, attic, or any other location that is too far from the primary access point to get a reliable signal.
MoCA technology is a great alternative to traditional Ethernet cabling and costs a fraction of what you would pay to retrofit dedicated Ethernet cabling in your home, making it a worthwhile option when Wi-Fi just can’t get from point A to point B.
