Yeah, it’s a cool technology, like powerline networking on steroids.
In your case, you can get the fiber to enter the home in any room that has a cable outlet, and then use MoCA to connect the rest of the house to that one outlet.
You’ll have to buy a bunch of MoCA adapters (one per cable outlet you want to use as ethernet), but it’s easier than running new CAT6/7 lines.
Although I suspect @Reply and others have more technical background on the technology, I’m happy to share my experience as an end user.
Installing MoCA entails connecting a MoCA adapter at each end of the coax cable run, and plugging an Ethernet cable from the incoming ONT/router/source into the adapter at that end and from the adapter at the other end into your computer/switch/router. There’s no setup, no changing settings, no app. Just plug it in and it works.
The trickiest part, in at least one of my installations, was figuring out the start and end points of each coax cable run, because there were multiple separate cables running throughout the house. It required buying a cable tracer. But that had nothing to do with MoCA as such.
You may need one of these: Point of Entry filter. It stops your data from getting out of your network and going upstream, where someone else might be able to intercept it. The description says it also avoids interference from other MoCA users. (Although that might only be needed for systems that use coax from the head end, not fiber systems. Does anyone know?)
And AFAIK, with almost any coax cable type, the potential speeds are at least 1 Gbps, as good as all but the latest Ethernet speeds, IIRC. And potentially much higher.
As I said, fast, inexpensive, easy, and reliable.
(I don’t, actually! I know about it but never had a home with coax that needed it. Your personal experience is worth much more.)
Thanks, commasense. This is good info.
I suspect that my new ISP won’t provide the MoCA adapters, but that’s not a problem. I only need two - one for the fiber termination and one for the coax termination at my router.
There’s also an easy and zero expense way to trace multiple coax cables. Don’t need a dedicated tracer.
No, the ISP won’t provide them. You buy them yourself.
And that might be what I’m facing because their CSRs are idiots. They just laid fiber outside my house but the speeds they offer don’t match fiber.
I mean, it’s possible they actually are rolling out fiber, but I’m not sure.
Xfinity is also just a shitty company IMHO. They had to change their name because Comcast was so hated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their CSRs just didn’t know what they were talking about. I don’t think anybody who has other choices would want to work for Xfinity customer support… poor fellas.
The ISP in my small town (pop. 3K) is laying fiber and I had a drop run to my house a few weeks ago. Just waiting on the ONT. I tried maxing out my current 50Mbs cable and could only briefly hit 25 Mbs. Now I’m going to have 1 Gbs.
Have fun! It’s a great opportunity to try 4k streaming, GeForce Now if you like computer games, or just loading SDMB posts really, really fast.
Fibre is great, I’ve had it for about 6 years now. My speeds are up to 3Gb each way.
There are fiber internet setups which use fiber most of the way and copper for the very last stretch - FTTC (fiber to the curb/cabinet) where there’s a copper from the street pole or cabinet to the home; and FTTB where the fiber comes to somewhere in the building but there’s a final bit of copper to the actual router. I believe the latter is mostly used in apartments and other multi-dwelling buildings, where fiber comes to the utility room and the individual dwellings are connected to it by copper.
But as far as I understand it for new deployments the preference is to run the fiber all the way in to an ONT inside the dwelling where possible.
That’s a pretty common retrofit scenario.
The '70s condo complex I used to run had an existing all-coax plant for CATV + internet that was itself a retrofit from the original building config which had twisted pair POTS and a 75 ohm flatwire from a community OATV antenna on the roof.
We wanted to change providers and interviewed several. One offered FTTB, and the other proposed to run fiber to each apartment. Knowing the poor condition of the coax plant, we went with #2. The coax retrofit 20 years had put a set of bulky plastic raceways up the exterior of the building for each stack. Tres ugly and half-assed. Which raceways were now all embrittled and failing despite being painted over. Post the fiber install we eventually ripped the coax off the side of the building before the next repaint. Technically that was destroying Comcast Xfinitiy’s property, but screw them.