OT – Extending your Ethernet Network

[admin]

There is a lot of techhead here….
So, what is the best way of extending an Ethernet network?

MoCA or powerline Ethernet? MoCA seems more elegant and a newer technology.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury of a parallel Cat6 network.

[spdrun]

How fast does it need to be? Can you use a high-speed wifi extender (i.e. wifi to Ethernet)? Some routers can be set up to do this.

Is there any specific reason why you need Ethernet, i.e. speed or PoE for cameras?

[FlyerInHi]

The TV on the other side of my parents’ house is not getting good wifi so streaming is impossible. Steaming where the cable modem is located is perfectly fine.

Btw the cable modem (Motorola Sbg6782) support moca out of the box so I’m thinking about getting adaptor for the other side.

[spdrun]

Try MoCA, but if the coax run to the TV is part of the cable network, read the following thread. You don’t want to be sharing a network with the neighbors by accident. (Mostly a theoretical possibility, but still.)

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/moca-security-concerns.14490/

If MoCA doesn’t work out, you can always play with wifi extenders. They basically act as repeaters/amplifiers, and might get wifi to the TV.

[FlyerInHi]

interesting… I guess, if the neighbor were good friends, we could access the cable cluster and link the 2 houses together to share the service.

[no_such_reality]

MOCA seems very bandaid to me. Granted smart to leverage a typically in place legacy technology if you can extend it’s usefulness, but working tech, I’ve had that mind set from exec management bite me in the back side so many times…

I’d probably give the Wifi extender a try first, one like this Netgear maybe.

The wifi extender is two fold solution, fixes the tv streaming and solves the wifi coverage problem.

[svelte]

We used powerline Ethernet for awhile…it worked but wasn’t the greatest.

Then we switched over to Netgear R6300v2 AC1750 wireless and can get nice wireless speed all over the house.

For the first month or two we saw quite a few drops on some devices, but something seems to have changed where I can’t recall seeing a problem in many months. And we get all the speed we need at our Roku box two rooms away from the router.

If the R6300 still doesn’t cover the whole house, I would go with the extender recommended above.

[moneymaker]

If you need more signal in one direction only then I would try one of these Model # S812EA-100 from Home Depot. It’s a piece of 8″ by 12″ metal flashing. Bend it in half so that it forms a right angle 6″ high, place your router on it with the metal perpendicular to where you want the signal to go. I was able to get 4 times the strength with this method, I think they sell for 98¢.

[bearishgurl]

I purchased Netgear extender WN3000RP in late 2013 when I got a notice in the mail that Cox was installing fibre optic in the neighborhood to “upgrade” our service and telling us to upgrade our modem and router to a wireless “N” or above to get the best results from the upgrade.

When the upgraded service was complete, I couldn’t get wifi in a part of my house so purchased a new Netgear CMD31T modem, WNDRMACv2 router and extender (above). I am very happy with the service now (we don’t yet have buried cable around here).

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=moneymaker]If you need more signal in one direction only then I would try one of these Model # S812EA-100 from Home Depot. It’s a piece of 8″ by 12″ metal flashing. Bend it in half so that it forms a right angle 6″ high, place your router on it with the metal perpendicular to where you want the signal to go. I was able to get 4 times the strength with this method, I think they sell for 98¢.[/quote]

Very smart! though not so attractive.

[spdrun]

Paint it to be same color as the wall using metal paint. Or paint it to be decorative.

[FlyerInHi]

I’m very particular with little things laying around. That’s why I have great admiration for Apple. In their stores, they take good care to hide the cables.

It’s a 1 story house, so I think the most elegant solution would be to run an Ethernet cable up in the attic. It’s a lot a work though.

[FlyerInHi]

I have since experimented w/ MoCA.
Great product. Pretty much flawless and easy to setup. You can also add security.
I never had Tivo or Verizon FIOS, but they apparently support MoCA natively. I prefer the stability of a wired network.

I’m good friends w/ a neighbor in my condo building. We are now using it to share Internet using the unused Dish Network home run cable (the building has parallel Dish home run cables for people who wish to use it). A good way to save money.

[moneymaker]

AC router then if you need even more distance go with an extender. I use a Netgear Nighthawk for my wifi and the metal flashing for my security cameras.

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