[SOLVED] Coax, Docsis and my House

[Shadowex99]

So, the more I read about Docsis and MoCA, the more confused I get. My house was built back in 2004 and installed, came a coaxial cable network for the rooms in the house. My question is, if Docsis 2.0 was the standard of that time, does that mean my theoretical bandwidth limit is 40Mbit/s (300mbps) download and 30Mbit/s (250mbps)? I currently have a 300down/300up internet plan and if my speculations are correct, if I get a plan any higher than current from my ISP i'll hit a wall due to the limitations of my home network.

Evidentially, through Coaxial to Ethernet to my computer, I'm getting around 330mbps down and 275 mbps up. When I was using 150/150, my upload speed was pretty much always on par with my download.

Lastly, if I were to upgrade my home internal network, what is the best cable option (Ethernet via Cat6a/7 connections throughout the house? or switching my cables to Docsis 3.1 full duplex)

 

[bill001g]

You likely already have rg6 coax cable which will run docsis 3.1. It tends to be the splitters that cause the issues

Ethernet cable will always be better because each computer gets dedicated bandwidth/cable unlike docsis and other technologies where the bandwidth is shared.

You want to run cat6a. Cat7 was never really fully certified and it provides little to no advantage especially in a home installation. Maybe in the future you will need 10gbit but currently there is little actual need. It take specially designed systems to be able to take advantage of it. Cat6a can run 10gbit to 100 meters just like cat7. There is stuff coming that will likely run at 100gbit that will be called cat8 but I suspect they have not actually even got it to work in the lab yet....an again there is no actual need so they are in no big rush.

It is very surprising your ISP offers 300up/down. It takes a lot more upstream channels and it is kind of a waste of bandwidth to dedicate so many channels to upstream.

The more standard implementation of docsis3 with 32//8 only can get a theoretical upload of about 250mbps and most times it is far less.

 

[SamirD]

I'm confused about what you have installed. Do you have moca adapters in the house? Or are you just talking about your cable modem?

 

[Shadowex99]

You likely already have rg6 coax cable which will run docsis 3.1. It tends to be the splitters that cause the issues

Ethernet cable will always be better because each computer gets dedicated bandwidth/cable unlike docsis and other technologies where the bandwidth is shared.

You want to run cat6a. Cat7 was never really fully certified and it provides little to no advantage especially in a home installation. Maybe in the future you will need 10gbit but currently there is little actual need. It take specially designed systems to be able to take advantage of it. Cat6a can run 10gbit to 100 meters just like cat7. There is stuff coming that will likely run at 100gbit that will be called cat8 but I suspect they have not actually even got it to work in the lab yet....an again there is no actual need so they are in no big rush.

It is very surprising your ISP offers 300up/down. It takes a lot more upstream channels and it is kind of a waste of bandwidth to dedicate so many channels to upstream.

The more standard implementation of docsis3 with 32//8 only can get a theoretical upload of about 250mbps and most times it is far less.

So to my limited understanding. rg6 coax cables came before Docsis 3.1 but can still run Docsis 3.1? What defines whether my home network uses what version of Docsis. The only thing I could find about my current modem is that it has MoCA 2.0. Also, my ISP has fibre lines all over the city so they actually offer up to 1gbps the same as other internet providers of the area.

I'm confused about what you have installed. Do you have moca adapters in the house? Or are you just talking about your cable modem?

I have ISP provided MoCA adapters around the house, yes. They're a little bit dated though. Is that a contributing factor into what version/how much bandwidth I can theoretically have through ethernet?

EDIT: Wow the ISP provided MoCA adapters are actually basically the Actiontec Bonded MoCA 2.0 ethernet adapters which go on amazon for ~100 each and they gave us like 5 of them.

 

[SamirD]

I have ISP provided MoCA adapters around the house, yes. They're a little bit dated though. Is that a contributing factor into what version/how much bandwidth I can theoretically have through ethernet?

EDIT: Wow the ISP provided MoCA adapters are actually basically the Actiontec Bonded MoCA 2.0 ethernet adapters which go on amazon for ~100 each and they gave us like 5 of them.

Yep, but only if you're exceeding 1Gbps and/or the moca isn't connecting at its full capability. This is also a 'shared' 1Gbps, so if you had two things trying to move stuff at 1Gbps at the same time, each one would be limited to a portion of the total bandwidth. There's a solution to that though--Moca 2.5--2.5Gbps shared bandwidth.

That's a really nice ISP that did that because those are top notch and you basically have an ethernet network in your house with those.

 

[Shadowex99]

Yep, but only if you're exceeding 1Gbps and/or the moca isn't connecting at its full capability. This is also a 'shared' 1Gbps, so if you had two things trying to move stuff at 1Gbps at the same time, each one would be limited to a portion of the total bandwidth. There's a solution to that though--Moca 2.5--2.5Gbps shared bandwidth.

That's a really nice ISP that did that because those are top notch and you basically have an ethernet network in your house with those.

So just to reiterate everything. The cables are much less the limiting factor than the MoCA adapter and capabilities of my modem to transfer over them.