cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63691946
Looking for advice on setting up a new whole home network and the direction to take of MoCA over existing cabling vs running new Ethernet Cat6A:
Recently in a new space that has an existing HomeConnect CSMAPDU9VPI with coax cables run throughout the home, which seems like a great candidate to just use MoCA and get up and running faster:
But I am also interested in “future proofing” the network setup and replacing the coax cables that are already run with Cat6A Ethernet, all connecting to a central 10G switch / homelab setup.
Is it worth the effort to re-run all of the cables and swap out the wall plates or just go with the simple thing an run with a MoCA setup? I’d really prefer to not spend on one setup with the plan to update in the future, but maybe that’s the compromise solution to get setup and running sooner.
The CSMAPDU9VPI is currently completely isolated from the cable line to the modem (picture above is old and shows a cable connected to the IN port, this cable is no longer connected) so I don’t think I have to worry about interference with my DOCSIS 3.1 service / modem.
This looks WILDLY similar to my old setup! If you’ve got really old RG59 in there, it’s going to suck - horrible jitter, and sub-1gig for sure, and obviously the longer the run the worse it gets.
If you throw 2.5 Gbps adapters on to a nice clean piece of new RG6 though, especially point to point (but then you’d lose this boost), it is not terrible.
In the end it was just a stopgap, I think I used it for about 5 years and then the first time I was having work done and had some parts of the walls open I got my guy to run fibre everywhere he could, and cat8 everywhere else. I do still use one of the RG59 links, just joined at that panel, to do a point to point from an upstairs bedroom, down through the basement and back up to the living room, just carrying super low volume corosync traffic for one of my lab clusters - but all the rest is migrated off now and is a way less frustrating connection now.
I may reuse one of the good RG6 through cinderblock pieces to do RS485 between my ERV and my Home Assistant Yellow at some point in the future, but for the most part the coax is now abandoned (and we flipped the house to fibre internet years ago too.)
MoCa adapters are a decent option if running new cable is difficult, but 10 gig adapters still aren’t available.
If you want 10 gig, run fiber, not CAT6. Twisted pair uses a lot of power. Fiber uses less than a watt per port and is future proof.
Another vote for fiber. I ran cat6 in my house (when the electricians had the walls open) just 3 years ago and I already wish I’d run fiber instead.
I looked at using moca for some things before, the spec supports 10gb, but I could only find adapters up to 2.5. My main questions for you is what effort vs performance do you want. Moca adapters are $50ish each, how many endpoints do you expect and are you ok with 2.5gbs or less at each?
Also worth noting, moca is right now 2.5gbps on the line half duplex, which is much slower than 10gbps full duplex per broadcast domain of a Ethernet cable
