We built the house that we currently live in during 1993. At that time, I had arranged to have 10 data/telephone outlets installed in various locations in the house. I basically copied what we had done a few years earlier at Wesleyan in the student dorms. It consisted of one telephone connection, one for AppleTalk network (remember that?), one for Cable TV connection and one for Ethernet connection. I hired the same contractor who did the wiring for Wesleyan to do this work at our home.
All the wires were patched into a punch down block in the basement, clearly marked so that I had a good idea of which connection is punched down where. To date, I have confusion when I see “North Wall of Bedroom 2”. I have to orient myself with Route 81 that runs North/South and is parallel to our road 🙂 I had a network hub that I purchased which created the local area network. We had multiple computers and I would create connectivity between them to exchange files, share a backup disk on one machine, a printer to which which we could print via AppleTalk etc. etc. It was a bit too early for home internet connectivity at that point. So, the connectivity was through the modem and there was always a fight for who gets to use them – between my wife and me.
A great advantage of this was that our basement became the center for our elder son’s “LAN (Local Area Network) parties”. In the early to mid 90s groups could play games together over a LAN because home internet was not yet available. Almost every weekend, a bunch of teenagers would come on a saturday evening (we would feed them) and play for however long into the night they played and their parents will come to pick them up on a Sunday afternoon. We were the only ones to have the network facilities at home at that time. Over a period, others had similar things so they started moving around.
A few years later, I subscribed to one of the internet services through a either DirectTV or Dish Network, I cannot remember. In short, it was an exciting moment for all of us to be able to connect to the internet initially, but over time, it became practically useless. Every time it snowed, we will lose connectivity. This is precisely the time we want it to be working! Also, because of where we live and line of sight issues, the vendor stopped returning our calls to line it up properly. That ended this experience soon.
I believe we were on DSL for a while and then finally our town got Comcast Cable connection. That was a game changer for us. One feed to the basement and I had a network switch by that time and multiple devices connected etc. etc. Having ethernet connections in multiple locations was pretty handy because there was no WiFi initially.
Then came the WiFi and most wiring infrastructure was obsoleted. I still needed them to hook up the WiFi access points in multiple floors and a lone printer. We have WiFi routers in each of the two floors and basement to provide seamless connectivity.
With all of these, there was something that was annoying and I was unable to solve it easily, until recently! From the COVID time, I have been asked to use a room upstairs which was added later than the initial build. I did have one ethernet connection to this room, but when we moved ADT, our home security system, away from the phone to use cell signals, they needed the ethernet wiring in this room. It is on the top floor and ADT gets signal only there. So, having given up the network wiring for this purpose, this room did not have a WiFi access point.
Also, whenever I work, because of meetings etc (and I am naturally loud), I need to have the door closed because my wife is working in the next floor and often teaching or talking to her collaborators. The nearest WiFi access points are in two nearby bedrooms. Long story short -despite the fact that the door is closed, I do have decent signal, however it has been a problem in that I lose connectivity to VPN every two to three days. Re-establishing VPN means me having to re-login into multiple systems, typing passwords and 2FA tokens etc. etc. A real pain. All attempts to see if this is an issue at VPN end indicated it was not. As hard a pill as it was to swallow this, I had to accept that this is my issue to solve!
Then one day I was looking at this setting on my Comcast internet configuration screen called MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance). This basically is a brilliant idea. Since most of us have a lot of Coaxial cables run to multiple rooms for cable TV, why not use it for local area networks? I did some research and found that it really works. And guess what? In this room that I work in, there is indeed an unused Coax outlet.
In January I ordered a MoCA adapter from Amazon. It was amazingly simple. You connect the coax to the device and then connect the WiFi Access point to its Ethernet port. You do need to turn on MoCA on your Comcast router. Thats it.
How well does it work? AMAZING! I have uninterrupted internet service here for the period I am connected. When we had a weather related issue, then Comcast itself was down for a few hours (during which time I used the AT&T hotspot on my phone), but other than that, it has been remarkably solid. I just wish I had done this much earlier!!!
I highly recommend this to any of you who is struggling with similar issues. Even if you have a TV in use, you can add a splitter and use it for a MoCA router and TV.