10 Gigabit Network Retrofit for Renters. No Drilling Required! 

Looking for a speedy browser? Try SigmaOS for free! (sponsored) go.sigmaos.com/snazzylabs

2 notes about MoCA: 1. If you use a splitter, make sure you get one that supports the frequency range that your MoCA adapters work at. 2. Some providers (DirectTV is one) operate in the normal frequency range of MoCA and have their own MoCA "equivalent" requiring different equipment.

Who’s paying $10 per month for a browser?

I like the quarter-round hack the best; never thought of pulling up a wood strip and replacing with that track! Great for some wood floor rooms where you can't tuck the cable under the trim. The inside turns are a little tight (especially for Cat6A or better), but as long as you don't have too many of those bends... should be okay.

Note about MoCA: While it is backwards compatible, the entire MoCA network will work at the speed of the slowest adapter on the network. So if you have a mix of 2.0 and 2.5 devices, the MoCA network will work on 2.0 speeds.

I had my home spec’d out with coax outlets in every room, including the garage and bathroom. I feel like a genius now because this can help get rid of the dead spots and my unsightly access point and 25ft cable! Thanks for the info! I’m subscribing!

I invested heavily into powerline stuff last month. It was a mistake. It blows. Thanks for spreading the word about that!

I have a network installation and consulting business, typically we will run ethernet to network locations but there are some instances where that's not feasible. MOCA has always been our go-to for those instances and we've been very happy with the results. We like using the Motorola brand ones because they come with everything that you might need(cables, POE filters, mounting templates).

I really like how you take the time to explain and present the problem at the beginning of your videos. Really makes the difference to get me hooked. Compared to the one liners most channels do to explain or present the problem.

Last time I was this early he still was baby faced

Another option if the place you're renting already has holes in the walls and cables ran outside, you can easily remove the sealant and covers on the holes and swap out the faceplates for ones with 2 or more slots and run an outdoor rated Cat6 following the coax to another room. You don't have to drill any new holes and no one will ever notice the difference. This is what I did in my current apartment when I moved in and needed a line going to the back bedroom around the back of the house.

I’ve been looking at MOCA since I setup my desk upstairs.. love your clear and concise setup for it. Going to setup my WiFi with this too.. awesome video

Thank you for this! I live in a condo, an older concrete building where WiFi signals are easily absorbed. I initially bought a WiFi Extender to use with my Asus router, and while it 'worked', it never boosted the signal to something I was happy with. The condo has coax cabling throughout, and after watching your video, I immediately bought the gocoax starter kit with 2 nodes. With the MoCA setup, I'm now able to run ethernet to areas of my home I wasn't able to before and the speed increase is dramatic. I repurposed the WiFi Extender to work as a wired Access Point and my WiFi coverage & speed now makes full use of my internet connection. A fantastic solution all around!

I believe there is now the option of placing a tiny naked fiber optic cable next to the edges of doors and underneath them that makes retrofitting a wired connection possible and barely visible. I believe Movistar was testing it for consumers in Spain to avoid drilling holes and ugly cables.

Easily one of the most captivating hosts on any tech channel. Love your channel!

Excellent overview of these options! I'm quite partial to MoCA for when I can't just run an ethernet cable - been using it as backhaul for a secondary AP for a couple of years now! Works perfectly.

So, I never ever watch the inline ads, unless it from Quin, and I'm so glad I did because I just start using SigmaOS. I was always looking for a combination of Safari and Chrome so thanks! And even learned a thing of two, didn’t know about Moca. So good job Quin!!

I have been using MOCA in my home network for about the last 6 months. It is as close to a wired ethernet solution as one can get without being Ethernet. It is fast and stable and that minor latency hit is negligible to the point of being imperceptible. I run VMs directly off my NAS with near zero impact to performance. I'll be watching for the MOCA 3 devices. I don't need 10GB to the internet but I'd love it for my home lab and server / NAS devices.

Also for hiding cable in cracks I recommend a window screen spline installation tool. It looks like a handle with rollers at each end. One has a groove in it. Use that to just roll the cable under the baseboard trim or anywhere you need it to go.

This is what I needed! I just moved to a two story house and my office is upstairs. I get decent fiber speeds on the eero, but I really want a hardwired connection to make the most out of my 2 Gig speeds. Since there is already coax in every room, this is a great solution! Thanks!

Great video. I looked into this a few years ago when I was renting a room at a friends house. I went through 3 different powerline adaptors because the first 2 died after a year or kept randomly dropping the connections. Went with TP link(same as your link) and they worked but was slow and reliability went down when I added one for the garage. I later heard of MoCA and made an attempt to set it up. My friend had a Comcast guy come out but he never heard of MoCA even after I said they have that on their modem. I had a plan of using a filter in the incoming coax line to prevent the neighbors from possibility seeing my network if they had their own MoCA adapters. Then a coax splitter going to their modem and the MoCA adapter. After the brief chat with the Comcast tech, I changed my idea to separate the cable connection and only connect my bedroom, garage and living room(had 2 coax connections) for a separate network from Comcast coax. The Comcast tech cut all of the coax cables not in use in the box so I had to repair the ones I needed. I ended up moving 2 months later so I never completed the project. Its mostly ready to go but my friend decided to run with WiFi in the garage even knowing its never worked reliably there. I bought a condo and now using 1gb fiber connection through the wall between my bedroom and dining room.

Some MOCA adapters are plug and play. Some also have bujlt in splitters for cable boxes, etc. Great video!

Thank you Quinn! We have HFC for internet here in our mid-80s house in Aus but also as a result, co-ax in several rooms. I’ve been using unifi mesh for the last year but have been getting lots of drop outs and varied performance- I had no idea about moca! Will definitely give it a good for back haul

Modernist Cuisine at Home on the shelf. Vitamin blender. Thermador microwave. Nice. Quinn seems to appreciate quality in all aspects of his life, not just in high tech stuff.

Great stuff, I did not know that one. I just had to do a similar task, but decided to go for home fibre. These tiny glass fibre "cables" are very easy to install, because they are super thin. You can pull them through your existing power lines or just underneath your carpet. I pulled a 40 Meter cable from the first flor down to my studio and gigabit works great, also the latency is super quick.

Recently, I’ve been deployed to work remotely for my company and my router is way too far to have a viable ethernet connection recently I was looking at getting a mocha adapter, but it was kind of underwhelmed by how few videos there are on it. I’m thankful to see you made one :)

Great video. Ive used MOCA adapters for a couple of years now and it was a game changer for sure

I was this close to removing all the coax cabling at home since it isn't entirely inside the walls (but it's running at the bottom of them). This could give those cables a new purpose since we stopped watching TV that way. Nice video Quinn.

I was passively researching all of this over the last year as I wanted to get a wired connection to my office, this is by far the best video on topic I have seen and I even learned a few things here (somehow I had the impression if you are using the coax in your house, you can NOT use MoCA, which I learned is not true). I ended up just dropping Ethernet everywhere I needed it from the attic. Not the cheapest option but definitely the proper one, although had I seen this video before I ran the ethernet I would have definitely went the MoCA route.

Wow this is a video that I’ve been wanting for a long time. Super informative for us renters out there.

This is the first time I’ve seen a sponsor spot that I’m actually interested in. Quinn, would you do a deep-dive on SigmaOS and it’s features? Looks dope, I’ll be trying it out.

This is crazy. I never heard of this before and it’s basically a no brained solution!

Awesome video, going to be great for folks who don't realize MoCA is a thing! FWIW (as you noted, but to reiterate), MoCA goes up to 2.5Gbps, so if you're doing a "10 gigabit" retrofit, the max throughput once it hits MoCA will be capped at that 2.5Gbps speed, even if the rest of your ethernet is 10Gbps capable. I do have it on my LAN since my house is really big and I use it for a few spots in my house where I don't have ethernet and the WiFi signal is 💩. So far it has been amazing and I was thrilled to realize I had that option; I had no clue it existed.

This was just the video I needed. Just bought a new place which has plenty of coax but almost no ethernet. Once again you're my hero, I'm staying super snazzy!

This is the information I was badly needing, thanks!

I never hear anybody ever mentioning this, but there are these special flat wires that you can use to pass an ethernet cable through a door or window, i used them in my previous apartment, it was just a ribbon cable with ethernet on 2 sides, flat enough to fit through the gap of a closed door. i loved it

super useful video, i install fiber internet for clients and they always ask me about these systems! never really dove too deep into how decent they were (knew power line was meh other than that had no idea about MoCA!) really appreciate this video as now i have actual suggestions for people lol

MoCA is amazing!!! I use it in my home and my TV provider give MoCA 2.0 (500Mbs) for Free for every room you want

Ha! I was just looking into this and found the same solution. Glad to have the Quinn approved method.

Thank you for doing my job for me. I will link people to your video from now on everytime someone comes to me with excuses about why they can't wire in.

When I was a Verizon FiOS technician, moca was my favorite easy recommendation for fixing bad wifi. Any current FiOS router already supports it out of the box and you can use any moca receiver not just the Verizon branded ones!

Quinn, thank you so much for this! I had to move my PC to another room and have been relying on WiFi. Appreciate the video so much!

Wow, moca looks awesome. that’s incredible. I will definitely keep us in mind.

I’ve been using ActionTec MOCA since 2017. I live in a pretty long mobile home with the modem in the front bedroom. I can tell you with 100% certainty that everything he said in this video is 100% correct. The back bedroom is essentially the exact same performance as plugged in at the actual modem

As someone who felt they knew about most options, MOCA is a new one and a game changer. Thank you!

14:25 OMG FLUFFY KITTY!!!! What a good-looking cat! 😍😍

I really enjoyed this video. I knew about the first two options, but not the last. I wish I knew sooner.

So excited to try this!!

I didn't need to do any setup at all for MoCA, it just worked, I guess depends on the adapter? As for security, you can get your own filter that you can put on the back of your cable modem very cheaply. Also they make splitters specifically for MoCA networks, a bunch of lower quality splitters could possibly harm your network speeds.

Great information, and well researched.

Always helpful and good quality.

I live in an NYC apartment with a bunch of SSID around me, I have FiOS and struggled to get the max speeds, however just found out from your video about coax cable connection, now I have max speed on my Xbox and PC without wifi.

Gran video. Justo estaba pensando en apostar por una red Powerline para construir mi red doméstica. Finalmente me decidí por una red Mesh Wifi 6. Este video me confirma que hice lo correcto. Saludos desde Colombia.

Awesome stuff Quinn thank you!

It is amazing what speeds you can achieve these days with powerline transfer. I remember the days when the maximum speed through the powerlines was 9600 baud and the general consensus was that this represents the best technically possible speed achievable through the powerline cables.

I'm about to rent a newly constructed house (So new that I'm moving in the same week construction finishes). For some reason, the landlord decided to wire the house with CoAx but not Ethernet 🤔⁉️ Glad to learn about this!

Just installed a mesh Wifi 6 system using MoCA for an ethernet backhaul on the satellites and it is working great! bit pricey for the adapters but worth it overall

My dad in the late 90s put coax and analog antenna outlets in every room, speaker wire in multiple places, but only two phone jacks and no Ethernet. Though, for now Powerline is adequate, especially considering there's devices that in addition to Ethernet jacks provide Wi-Fi as well, and way better than any repeater ever could, despite Powerline's issues.

Fantastic content. It was great to meet you at LTX sir!

MoCA saved my basement. The family room was part of an addition to the house in the 80's and behind concrete... That's where I have my desktop PC and Xbox. I needed a hardwire connection and MoCA made it possible!

Crazy watch bro. Looks good on your wrist, works with the green.

I installed one of these power line systems in my apartment yesterday. Wifi interference was awful. Slow, but no jitter or packet loss is a good trade-off for me.

I took most of my coax out years ago after I cut the cord with DirecTV, and got I rid of Breezeline cable internet earlier this year due to high cost, leaving me with only one coax run, so I had considered power line adapters, but like you said it's not the most reliable, so when I went with T-MO fixed 5G(my other option was overpriced really slow DSL) to save some money(i'm still pulling between 400Mbps - 600Mbps + down/ 50Mbps - 150Mbps + up with pings between 16ms - 40ms being the worse I've seen, with all that consistently), and had to put the 5G gateway in my front living room for best signal, I went with a 4 base(they come in 3 packs, and I got the 4th one used) TP-Link X20 mesh WiFi setup, and I'm still getting close to my speeds at the Gateway across my house, so I don't think I'll be running any cables across my house anytime soon. So yeah a proper WiFi mesh setup can still be really good if you don't have more than a 1 gigabit connection.

I used MoCA for years and I can attest to it being no compromise. It was excellent and never had any hiccups. After initial setup I don't think I ever touched it again until I moved out.

Wow... It was a lot of useful info! Thanks!

RU-vid kept recommending this video to me many times and I kept not clicking it thinking you would just tell the story of how you out Ethernet everywhere and broke your walls and stuff. That couldn't be further from the truth and now I want to use coax on my home. It speaks tons about the title and the thumbnail, and not judging a book for the cover

Always a pleasure Quinn. Take care man.

Coax coming back - I remember building 10BASE5 COAX ethernet networks as a graduate student maybe 35 years ago and now throughout can be increased 3 orders of magnitude: WOW.

Powerline is essentially Wifi without the aerial, where your mains wiring is used as a wave guide to vaguely constrain that wifi signal. It even runs on the same 2.4GHz and 5GHz unlicensed radio frequency bands. We used to run a powerline network when we were renting and got around the same performance with our Homeplug (85Mbps) and AV200 kit as this video shows with AV2000 kit. I'd always assumed the problem with Powerline was that it wasn't keeping up with the latest innovations in wifi, but it looks like even with those innovations, home wiring isn't often able to take advantage.

I didn't know MOCA had advanced that much. This is going to be a great tool for those with larger homes.

Bought some MoCA adapters when I was renting a house, was able to rewired the existing coax cable to make it all work with my network setup. When I moved into my current house, rewired the existing coax to make it all work. Ethernet cable will be the next step but have to layout the path for ethernet in a townhouse setup.

Powerline adapters also trip arc fault breakers, which are required on most branch circuits starting with the 2020 NEC.

Im glad you tested this out

As an Indian I have to say American plug look like they are so amazed 😢 and cute 🥺 at the same time

Great video! Might I ask what kind of stand that is that you are using your Mac Studio Display on? It looks like a perfect size! Thanks again for the awesome video!

MoCA works great, I have the gocoax 2.5 for my Eero’s. The only big caveat is if you have Directv (Why?!?!), MoCA devices interfere with the satélite signal. (Best option is cut the cord and get rid of Directv, but if you must have it there are slower adaptors (non-MoCA) that work with Directv)

I didn’t know you could do MOCA while the cable is in use, so this might have convinced me to try MOCA soon. Only thing stopping me now is that with a WiFi 6E router, speeds are already fine, and the 2 devices that benefit significantly from a wired connection are next to the router anyway. One’s on the other side of the wall, but I already added ethernet to the existing coax plates and drilled a cheeky hole between the two. My plan was to maybe do MOCA if I ever switch from cable internet to fiber, but for now just use WiFi, but now I might actually do MOCA if I feel inclined to get faster speeds on my TV or move my router/modem somewhere else in the house.

If you really need to use your power line for Ethernet, I advice to use the brand Devolo instead of TP-Link. Also just acceptable as temporary solution, because still slower, but much more stability.

ive been using powerline for a couple months while im home from school (making a direct run in my house is unfeasable given im on a different floor and its not my house) and it gets to the cap of 30mb/s give or take and the performance in games is very solid. i take a small ping hit in games to get a very consistent connection when im playing games at night. i may have to try a coax solution though when we get gigabit (soon?), i do have one in my room, thanks for the info!

Great video and nice to know this technology exists. I don’t necessarily have a need for this, but I had to write a comment so I could tell you how beautiful your cat 🐈 is!! 😻😻

Nice video! All MoCA adapters should have a MAC address on the bottom of them. You should be able to add a reservation in your DHCP server/router and it’ll automatically assign it the IP you reserved for it. That way you always know where they are on your network unless you change DHCP server/router. Then you know exactly where to go to configure them every time.

i know its totally offtopic, but wow what a nice Rootbeer. Looks stuning.

Great video Quinn. Luckily we have ethernet throughout our house! Cheers from AKL, NZL.

SigmaOS seems cool…but Arc is the best. And it’s completely free-for all features. Sorry to crash your sponsored segment. 😂

Check out the FCA252 moca adapter. It has a handy 25GW toggle that lets them operate over the cable frequencies. I’m using this to “move” my wan connection to a different room. Then use other moca adapters as above. These can basically allow for two networks on the same coax cable!

In the UK, only the living room has coax you're talking about (in the UK we have 2 coax standards. One it the freeview standard, the other is the satellite/cable standard. Nicknames, btw, IDK their actual names, the one you want is the Satellite/Cable Coaxial cables, the most expensive kind). So a coax method isn't feasible here, so Powerline or Mesh Wireless are the 2 types most typical in the uk. You can still have a coax system even if there's only initially 1 point, you could expand it using new cable, but now you're running cable all over the home/flat (albeit still more reliable, and less costly than ethernet) you could get your whole home wired internet for about $15 + cost of the adapters and use a single run vs maybe about $60 ($40 with the advice I mention later, +$30 for every termination point. worth of ethernet + terminations, tools and in multiple runs (though if you use switches at every termination point that can also more easily be a single run, at an increased power usage and significant increase in cost.)

Another option that is slightly more "invasive" but doesn't require drilling or holes is using existing telephone lines for Ethernet. It would have to be a relatively newer house that uses 4 wires of a cat 5/6 Ethernet cable instead of actual telephone line, but if you can see the full cable behind a faceplate, get some cheap tools and a RU-vid video and you can turn it into Ethernet lines with gig speeds. Similar caveats with Moca, would be easier with a known central location you have access to and depends on implementation but it's an option.

I heard about MoCA probably a year ago from LTT and was thinking about trying to use it for some parts of where I live, particularly as part of a wireless mesh backhaul. But a little later, my internet was getting really spotty sometimes and the tech that came out said our signal was droppping because there were too many coax splitters running through the house, degrading the signal strength. After cutting out a couple of the splitters, our internet has been much more reliable, but eliminated the ability to use MoCA.

Love those contents. Stay Snazzy.

Speed is the least of the issues with power line adapters. By definition, they put a LOT of noise on your AC lines. This can cause a lot of issues with various electronics, from humming and popping on your audio system, to wifi connected power switches constantly resetting. They can cause all sorts of trouble.

You can mix and match powerline adapters to an extent: If they are implementing the Homeplug AV standard. Unfortunately the really fast Devolo Magic 2 powerline adapters are incompatible with Homeplug AV. However, you can use both types of powerline plugs on the same circuit. They won’t disturb each other. That being said: Powerline is highly situational. I have used it in a small holiday house with perfect, basically lab like results. Yet at home with many more circuit breakers its performance is abysmal. One thing you can try is having a phase coupler installed in your fuse box. If you are using DSL, powerline might also be a bad option, since it tends to use the same frequencies but transmits over unshielded cables, turning your walls into antennas. The phone cable itself is also likely unshielded. However, advanced adapters such as Devolo Magic 2 have options for compensating (V)DSL. I haven’t tried them, because I am using fibre, but they might be an option. Also I’m talking about the situation in Europe. Powerline might behave differently here than in NA. In short: if you can, avoid powerline. But for homes with only one circuit breaker per floor it might work decently well or if there is no circuit breaker in between your adapters.

I was excited to try powerline in my home where running a network line would have been really difficult. I was running it to a HTPC and the audio interference was so awful it was unusable. Not to mention it was still slower than the wireless connection I had been using.

I wish I knew about MoCA earlier. I used Powerline for 10 years most of the time with not a lot of issues, but there were some annoying days. Since moving out of my moms house, I got tired of it and just put a cable down directly.

I had MOCA 2 for awhile it worked great, I but decided to Wired I used the molding around the floors worked great and the places where I had to go through a wall already was a hole where Coax used to be so just ran it through that. Didn't have to make any new holes.

This is the video I needed to see.

The issue with the power line is also because the lines have no twisted pairs. The more twists in a lair of lines in cat5 (also called twisted pair). You have the + on one line and the - on the other and they’re twisted inside the cable jacket. These twists cancel out noise and crosstalk. In fact the only thing that makes a cat 5 faster than a cat 3 and makes a cat 6 faster than a cat 5 is just the amount of twists in the pairs (this is disregarding the equipment on either end as that can be a bottle neck) Your power lines have no twists on the axis of the lines. This is why it will always be slower (plus everything you said). Another thing with MOCA is that you need quality cables, quality splitters that support moca frequencies (1500 MHz and above) and if there are too many splitters in the system then it will attenuate those frequencies too much (higher frequencies attenuate more than low frequencies). Also if the cable has poor shielding or is damaged or even has poor fittings it can let in a lot of noise. You’re more likely to see noise out of those frequencies as most frequencies do not operate within the moca frequencies. However if the transmission devices you use are using lower frequencies then your signal may be degraded if that’s the case. Also I wouldn’t count on your house having a moca filter as most moca systems are obsolete or some houses may never had a system that required a moca signal. Your isp may get a little annoyed if they find out you’re feeding moca frequencies into the cable plant haha. Although they’ll probably just give you a MOCA filter to help you out. You also need to make sure your moca network is all connected. Most isps don’t hook up extra cables that they aren’t using as it can backfired noise into the plant which affects the neighborhood. Sorry, not trying to sound annoying but it’s not always as simple as plug and play with a MOCA network.

Great video!

I use the exact Powerline you showed (Australian power version) and I get almost 100 mbps on speedtest for the 100 mbps system in my shared apartment. The router is one floor and 30m or so away, too. We don't have coax here.

I've never had much luck with powerline. I mean it works, and sometimes you'll get good speeds from it, but every load change also changes the speed or can even cause interruptions. I've only recommended it for people on something like DSL where the connection speed is lower than the even low powerline speeds and running a wire or wireless isn't feasible. I've got 5e wiring in my apartment, which was built just before wifi became common. It runs 2.5 gig fine (once I re-punched the runs on both ends) so I make do with that. Internet is 'only' gig fiber anyway.

Bought a 3 story townhouse and went with asus mesh routers connected to moca and 100% worth it