The reason you need a Moca/ethernet adapter at the TV has nothing to do with Comcast or Fios - it’s because the TV itself is not Moca capable. The tuner can/chip the TV uses has to have Moca capability, and in general, TV manufacturers aren’t installing Moca capability at all. So a balun won’t work under any circumstances.
We’re not looking at this for channel-changing ability - they’ll almost certainly have a cable box for that - but to provide input to the ethernet port on the TV for smart-tv functions. Knowing that, might the balun work?
The thing you linked to here seems to just passively move a signal from coax to cat5, so that if you’ve already got cat5 wired between two locations, it looks like coax. It comes in pairs because you have to put one on each end of the cat5. It absolutely will not convert a Moca networking protocol to an ethernet protocol by itself. So plugging coax into it, then putting the other end into an RJ45 ethernet socket will do nothing for you - the Moca protocol and the ethernet protocol are very different, and no ethernet device will know how to decode a Moca signal. You’d need a real Moca/ethernet bridge for what you’re trying to do.
What I was saying about the tuner can/chip was just that on Moca capable devices, like the set top boxes themselves, they use different hardware where the coax cable comes in, that essentially “splits off” the networking signal from the video signals. TVs don’t use that hardware, so they aren’t Moca capable at all.
Thanks!! That makes more sense now. So your take is that we would need a real conversion unit like the one I linked to that was 73ish dollars? (plus obviously a splitter; supposedly the units have a coax-out as well but reviews and our own experience suggest that works poorly).
Yes, you’ll need one of those bridges. I had no idea they were so expensive - probably because the expansion & acceptance of wifi means there’s a very limited market for them. I’ve got 3 at my desk, but my employer would frown on me sending you one.
Your issue is that you want networking from somewhere to somewhere else, not using wireless, and you only have coaxial cable running, right ? The easiest solution is powerline network adapters: TP-Link AV600 Powerline Ethernet Adapter(TL-PA4010 KIT)- Plug&Play, Power Saving, Nano Powerline Adapter, Expand Home Network with Stable Connections - Newegg.com. Plug an ethernet cable from your router into one side, and plug into an outlet in that room. The other adapter one goes in the outlet nearest your TV, and you plug an ethernet cable from the adapter to your TV. The whole Coax/Moca thing is a sideshow designed for the verizon FIOS TV boxes themselves that you don’t actually have to worry about if you just want to use netflix/hulu/etc, you can just treat it as a “i have internet here and need it here” problem.
I was just going to link to that!
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