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A seasoned mechanical design engineer turned tech reporter and reviewer, Chandraveer brings more than four years of consumer tech journalism experience to the table, with bylines at Android Police and iPhoneHacks. He’s written about everything from UI and UX changes across various apps to emerging software and AI trends. At XDA, he showcases his versatility in the tech reporting space with articles rooted in personal experiences and frustrations.

Chandraveer’s passion for consumer tech spills over into hobbies such as mechanical keyboards, photography, and 3D printing. With an academic background in design and manufacturing, his insatiable curiosity spans beyond the digital domain. Chandraveer’s downtime is an eclectic mix of reading fiction, practicing calligraphy, conceptualizing new products, and enjoying an expansive FLAC audio library.

We often talk about the router being the captain of the home network ship—and it is. A modern Wi-Fi 6E or 7 router can handle your entire smart home, NAS, home theater streaming, mobile devices, and then some. But no matter how many antennas your router has or how much it resembles a dead spider, it can’t bend physics. If you have thick walls, too much distance between APs, or plain old RF interference on popular bands, that wireless signal is going to degrade your experience. The only real solution for fixed devices like PCs, consoles, and NAS drives is a hardline connection. Sadly, running hardline isn’t always physically tenable.

That was my reality. I wanted the stability and speed of Ethernet, but my house fought me every step of the way. I wasn’t about to settle for flaky Wi-Fi or the disappointment that is powerline networking. I found the middle ground that feels like cheating: MoCA. It’s arguably the single best networking invention for people who want near-Cat6 speeds without the drywall dust. In my case, it would’ve been brick and cement dust, with all the internal cabling.

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Pulling wires is no mean feat

The concrete jungle problem

I live in a house that was built like a fortress. We’re talking bricks, cement, and masonry that laugh at Wi-Fi signals. Unlike modern construction with hollow drywall and convenient crawl spaces, my walls suffocate Wi-Fi quickly, and despite using every trick in the book, my two-AP mesh router system simply doesn’t cover the entire house. The only saving grace is that the builder wired the place for now-redundant telephone, internet, and coaxial wiring for cable TV.

I cannot imagine running new Cat6 cabling throughout this house without running into serious issues midway through the pull. With several 90-degree bends and absolutely no plans of renovating soon, pulling cable through the wall would be a multi-person operation that’d still involve stripping sheaths and sending probes in, with no guarantee of a successful result. It is very challenging, and quite frankly, beyond the scope of a weekend DIY project.

Ethernet purists with a server rack and a network switch in their basement may argue my next best option is to run Cat6 in external conduits to get true gigabit performance. They aren’t wrong, strictly speaking. Dedicated copper twisted pair is the gold standard. But for me, the pain-to-gain ratio was untenable. Destroying the aesthetic of my home or spending thousands on professional installers just to get a stable ping in Call of Duty wasn’t going to happen.

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Running wires beats running circles around the problem

Hijacking the Coaxial cable for MoCA

Making the most of what I already have

Credit: Source: MoCA Alliance

This is where MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) enters. Ideally, it hijacks your existing cable TV wiring to deliver up to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet-like speed without new holes, terminating plugs, and wire-pulling. Using this tech is brilliantly simple too. I’d just need to plug one MoCA adapter into the coax port near my router and give that Coax cable an Ethernet signal with a short patch cable from my router. I can plug a second adapter into the coax port in my distant bedroom, office, or living room, and use standard RJ45-terminating CAT6 cabling to connect it to the nearest Wi-Fi AP or fixed device like gaming PC or HTPC.

This gives me low-latency wired performance that smokes WiFi extenders or powerline adapters—minus the interference drama. It effectively turns my coax outlet into an Ethernet jack. This is a perfect retrofit for rental homes and older places already wired up with Coax for TV. Landlords generally frown upon tenants drilling holes through floors, but they rarely care if you plug a little black box into the TV outlet.

The speed is still plenty for a real gain over wireless. MoCA 2.0 bonded adapters and the MoCA 2.5 standard from 2016 can easily handle 2 Gbps or 2.5 Gbps throughput, respectively. I also love that, just like Ethernet, MoCA standards are backwards compatible so you could use 2.5G with older adapters. However, the network speed will be limited by the slowest adapter (the oldest standard in your network). Nonetheless, 2.5G and 10G are fairly prevalent standards on most mid-range home networking hardware, including NAS drives and network switches. It works great for 4K streaming, and transferring large files to a local server. The latency difference between MoCA and straight Cat6 is also practically negligible, to the order of 2-3ms more, which is imperceptible compared to the jitter of Wi-Fi.

There’s always a catch

Restrictions apply

Before you rush to Amazon, there are a few limitations to keep in mind. First, MoCA is a shared medium. Unlike an Ethernet switch where every port gets its own dedicated bandwidth lane, MoCA is more like a hub. If you have multiple MoCA nodes (say, four adapters in four different rooms), a MoCA connection slows down all of them by bandwidth sharing, just like Wi-Fi. All the signals are transferred over the same wire. You shouldn’t run into this bottleneck in most cases, because you’d use the full 2.5G bandwidth across multiple devices only in fringe cases.

Additionally, MoCA 2.5 operates at frequencies up to 1675MHz. So you might need new MoCA compatible splitters, depending on when yours were installed. The fine contributors over at r/homenetworking also recommend adding a Point of Entry (PoE) filter. Because coaxial cabling is a shared loop, your MoCA signal can technically travel back out of your house and into your neighbor’s house if they are on the same cable tap. A PoE filter is a cheap little dongle you screw onto the main input line of your house. It reflects the MoCA signal back into your home (improving performance) and keeps your network secure.

Hacksmith hardline internet for everyone

We put a lot of pressure on our routers to perform miracles, but sometimes the best upgrade is better wire. It doesn’t even need to be Ethernet in all cases. Sure, a good router does half the work, handling your phones and tablets, but you still need hardline internet for most of your fixed devices that hog bandwidth. MoCA is just what the doctor ordered if you’re an undemanding user who cannot run Cat6 internally or externally.

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