Question Convert coaxial to ethernet?

leedsboy

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Hello,

So I recently moved to Australia from UK - finally moved into a rental house and proceeded to make arrangements for getting internet in the house. Signed up with a provider (Telstra), who also arranged for an nbn box (connects to the Aussie broadband network) to be delivered to the house as there was not one here that we could see. The problem I have is that there are no ethernet wall sockets in the house. There is one socket in the house that has a sticker on it saying 'internet cable'. This has a coaxial (male) connection.
I haven't had much experience with internet through coaxial cables before and as the nbn box requires to be plugged in to an ethernet socket, is it best to get an engineer to install one of these, or can somebody tell me what adapters or cables I need to buy to convert the coax to ethernet? Lots of conflicting information online but most seem to lead to MoCa information, but even this is very confusing.

Please help!!

Thanks
 

leedsboy

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That's what a cable modem is for. Coax in, Ethernet and WiFi out.
Thankyou for your reply!! and already everything makes a lot more sense. A quick google search has shown me there is a different nbn box for coax connection. From what I now gather, the previous tenants/owners had cable tv setup and their internet ran from that.
The problem now is that we don't have cable tv, and we have no intention of getting cable tv (In fact we have no intention of getting a TV at all we have no need for one!!).

So new question is, is the internet going to work through the coax port if there is no cable tv service to the premises? if it is going to work, can I get some kind of converter to ethernet? or would it be a case of buying a new coax compatible modem or getting ethernet socket installed for the modem we have been provided by Telstra?
 

JeffreyP55

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Thankyou for your reply!! and already everything makes a lot more sense. A quick google search has shown me there is a different nbn box for coax connection. From what I now gather, the previous tenants/owners had cable tv setup and their internet ran from that.
The problem now is that we don't have cable tv, and we have no intention of getting cable tv (In fact we have no intention of getting a TV at all we have no need for one!!).

So new question is, is the internet going to work through the coax port if there is no cable tv service to the premises? if it is going to work, can I get some kind of converter to ethernet? or would it be a case of buying a new coax compatible modem or getting ethernet socket installed?
Not sure how your provider manages things. Log on to their website. Cox has a list of cable modems that are compatible with their system you can purchase. Or they have modems available that can be leased with a monthly fee. I bought my own Motorola that will eventually pay for itself. So you will have to find out what Telstra requires from you.
 

leedsboy

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Not sure how your provider manages things. Log on to their website. Cox has a list of cable modems that are compatible with their system you can purchase. Or they have modems available that can be leased with a monthly fee. I bought my own Motorola that will eventually pay for itself. So you will have to find out what Telstra requires from you.
Thankyou for your help
 
.... ah never mind. I though you were going austrillia to UK and using a device you purchased from the isp in autrillia and wanted to use it in the UK. I will leave the post just for information.
Note there are a lot of people that go to a lot of trouble to get UK tv over the internet also.


So not being from Australia what is a NBM box. Is this some kind a box that gets tv or stream video or is a router or maybe both ?

So first you need a modem the ISP will let you use on their network. You will in effect get 1 ethernet port but it is more you only get 1 IP address that is the problem.

So you now need a router. You in general can use any router from any ISP in any country since most connect the WAN port via ethernet. The "BUT" that comes into play is the wifi channels allowed are different from country to country to it tends to be illegal to use certain channels. It is more it legal to own the router but illegal to use certain feature. It may not have certain channels used by device you purchase in the UK so you need to be careful what you select. Here is the list I use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

So if the NBM box is a router you should mostly be set to go.

If the NBM box is some kind of tv streaming box then it gets messy. Every country has paid the movie studios etc different amounts of money. To avoid everyone signing up in the cheapest country....say india.. the tv content owns require that the box provider limit who they sell services to. They can do this via a only selling to people who have a billing address in the country or they can try to restrict IP ranges. This is why VPN is extremely popular since you can get tv channels and pretend you are in that country. Some companies allow payment methods that do not have to be in country and some pretend that they can't actually know that you are using a vpn. Netflix is a very strange example, they block many VPN providers but they don't block one of the very biggest, nordvpn I think was the one.

So if this is a box used for video content delivery you might need a vpn and if it also is a router then the device itself must have a vpn ability. Although with enough effort you could place a second router that could do vpn between the box and modem.
 
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JeffreyP55

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.... ah never mind. I though you were going austrillia to UK and using a device you purchased from the isp in autrillia and wanted to use it in the UK. I will leave the post just for information.
Note there are a lot of people that go to a lot of trouble to get UK tv over the internet.


So not being from Australia what is a NBM box. Is this some kind a box that gets tv or stream video or is a router or maybe both ?

So first you need a modem the ISP will let you use on their network. You will in effect get 1 ethernet port but it is more you only get 1 IP address that is the problem.

So you now need a router. You in general can use any router from any ISP in any country since most connect the WAN port via ethernet. The "BUT" that comes into play is the wifi channels allowed are different from country to country to it tends to be illegal to use certain channels. It is more it legal to own the router but illegal to use certain feature. It may not have certain channels used by device you purchase in the UK so you need to be careful what you select. Here is the list I use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

So if the NBM box is a router you should mostly be set to go.

If the NBM box is some kind of tv streaming box then it gets messy. Every country has paid the movie studios etc different amounts of money. To avoid everyone signing up in the cheapest country....say india.. the tv content owns require that the box provider limit who they sell services to. They can do this via a only selling to people who have a billing address in the country or they can try to restrict IP ranges. This is why VPN is extremely popular since you can get tv channels and pretend you are in that country. Some companies allow payment methods that do not have to be in country and some pretend that they can't actually know that you are using a vpn. Netflix is a very strange example, they block many VPN providers but they don't block one of the very biggest, nordvpn I think was the one.

So if this is a box used for video content delivery you might need a vpn and if it also is a router then the device itself must have a vpn ability. Although with enough effort you could place a second router that could do vpn between the box and modem.
Sounds like a mess. I stream with a VPN. Some content is in the grey area. I pay for Netflix and Amazon prime.
 
I don't know about Australia, but in the United States, most cable providers will sell you internet without a TV package. It all runs on the same network but at different frequencies within the same cable. The modem will provide the coax to ethernet connection you need for your wifi router.

To give you an idea:
cable-frequency.png
 

JeffreyP55

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I don't know about Australia, but in the United States, most cable providers will sell you internet without a TV package. It all runs on the same network but at different frequencies within the same cable. The modem will provide the coax to ethernet connection you need for your wifi router.

To give you an idea:
cable-frequency.png
I have Cox just for Ethernet and WiFi. When your monthly bill is about to hit $300.00 for a package it's time to move. Seems to be tough to completely cut the cable. Satelite is slow and 25megs is not I would call high speed internet. The USGOV does. I pay $120.00 a month for the 500meg package. Plus an OTA antenna that tunes 110 channels. 60 are usable.
 
I have Cox just for Ethernet and WiFi. When your monthly bill is about to hit $300.00 for a package it's time to move. Seems to be tough to completely cut the cable. Satelite is slow and 25megs is not I would call high speed internet. The USGOV does. I pay $120.00 a month for the 500meg package. Plus an OTA antenna that tunes 110 channels. 60 are usable.

25mbps is the MINIMUM speed to reach the definition of broadband. The term High-Speed is relative. But 25mbps is fine for streaming 1080p and even 4k movies. For surfing the web, research, email and playing video games. It's only slow when downloading very large files like game downloads. So I think it's a good definition to be considered the MINIMUM speed. Especially when you consider the challenges of how large our country is and trying to distribute internet to vast low population rural areas. 3mbps upload is slow though, I'd like to see that definition move up to 6-10mbps for better conferencing.
 

eye4bear

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I have Cox just for Ethernet and WiFi. When your monthly bill is about to hit $300.00 for a package it's time to move. Seems to be tough to completely cut the cable. Satelite is slow and 25megs is not I would call high speed internet. The USGOV does. I pay $120.00 a month for the 500meg package. Plus an OTA antenna that tunes 110 channels. 60 are usable.
$120 dollars a month for only 500mb speed seems super expensive. Is that a residential or business account? I get 1tb ATT fiber for $69.00 a month with no data cap and no TV package as a residential customer. I know that business accounts are charged higher fees, thus my question.
 

JeffreyP55

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$120 dollars a month for only 500mb speed seems super expensive. Is that a residential or business account? I get 1tb ATT fiber for $69.00 a month with no data cap and no TV package as a residential customer. I know that business accounts are charged higher fees, thus my question.
Not a business account$120 just for internet access is the going rate here in Phoenix, AZ. No AT&T fiber here. Dish but no thanks. Had Fiber for the first time in 1992 when I was an engineer a SLAC. LoL
 

JeffreyP55

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25mbps is the MINIMUM speed to reach the definition of broadband. The term High-Speed is relative. But 25mbps is fine for streaming 1080p and even 4k movies. For surfing the web, research, email and playing video games. It's only slow when downloading very large files like game downloads. So I think it's a good definition to be considered the MINIMUM speed. Especially when you consider the challenges of how large our country is and trying to distribute internet to vast low population rural areas. 3mbps upload is slow though, I'd like to see that definition move up to 6-10mbps for better conferencing.
That's what I said. FCC says what is what. "Advanced Service = More than 25 Mbps" Ten years ago 25 maybe.
500Mbps is overkill for me. I have a great gateway that covers my whole 2 story house with ease. So did 150Mbps without dropout. So do I really need 500Mbps? No..:) I do stream a lot of 4k content with no problems.
 
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abufrejoval

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Even after BREXIT I guess the UK is technologically a bit closer to what we have here in Germany (especially with Unitymedia/Vodafone owning the cable network now).

We typically have three wired Internet choices in the EU, but perhaps not all choices everwhere:
  1. DSL using classic copper telefone lines into the house. Limited to 250/50 Mbit/s down/upstream by the unshielded wire and physics, but at least its last mile bandwidth tends to be exclusive. It tends to be shared (10Gbit fiber, typically) from the roadside concentrator to the POP. Phone DSL can include digital TV services via a set-top box and/or phone services, but today it's all IP based, analog and ISDN phone is dead. I still use one of those as a backup line and because the tax authorities require me to have a separate private line so I can deduct my fiber line as business expense.
  2. DSL using copper coax cables. Originally had unidirectional UHF analog TV on it, these days it's using cable modems and sophisticated frequency band management to turn a shared (non exclusive) high frequency medium into something digital and bidirectional. With sophisticated modems on both ends and not too many users sharing the last mile, it can achieve gigabit speeds with DOCSIS 3.0, but typically it's very asymetrical e.g 500/50Mbit/s down/up. Again, it may be bundled with phone and TV services, sometimes via IP based via a set-top box, sometimes via a cable digital TV receiver. That cable digital TV stuff is probably technically obsolete, even if it is much greener than IP based TV services (because it's still true broadcast and not 1:1 TCP/IP). But those IP based ones are soo much easier to use if TV were a thing for you. I used that as a primary for Internet before fiber became available.
  3. Optical fiber. Limited mostly by what's being put into the nearest aggregator POPs. In residential areas it's currently available up to 1 Gbit/s symmetrical if you pay an extortionist premium. It's an exclusive medium right to the POP and naturally symmetric, but they love to ask double price if you want the full upstream bandwidth... The physical medium easily supports 10Gbit/s and more so it's just a matter of paying for the POP upgrade if you want truly premium bandwidth. Phone and TV are all IP based bundles if you want them. I switched to them, because they gave me 1000/500Mbit/s for the price of 500/50 on coax cable (Bye Unitymedia/Vodafone, welcome some Canadian venture fund!)

#1 and #2 typically have the advantage of already being available from a socket inside your home. But they suffer from squeezing packets through exclusive or shared copper media from your home to the roadside concentrator, while digital fiber tends to bypass that bottleneck (and its energy expense of the modulation/amplification) going optical right to the POP.

Nobody has a fully exclusive distribution network so once you're at the residential POP (typically a couple of kilometers away), everybody shares backbone providers and networks. Yet those must be redudant enough, because I've never had both land lines down at the same time (the firewall will switch automatically). I'm close to Frankfurt and DE-CIX which isn't the worst place to be on the Internet.

I haven't used TV or radio in decades, but then I don't watch women's football, either.

I guess you're facing variant #2 and they'll bundle a matching cable modem, perhaps including a full firewall/access-point appliance with it, which will offer WIFI and Ethernet. In Germany for some reason that is almost always a Fritz!box. That is certainly the easiest, not necessarily the cheapest because they tend to charge extra for anything not a naked cable modem.

If you transfer from Down Under, perhaps getting something that just works is preferable. At least in the EU ISP contracts are down to one year maximum duration, so we're not indenturing for life any more.

If your concern were to be using coax as an Ethernet replacement for within the house, that's where MoCa comes into play. I use it to bridge the gap between the Ethernet port on my fiber connection, which comes out in the attic and my appartment in the floor below. The building is 170 years old and there are no cable tunnels, but they did put in coax cables for a shared roof TV antenna 50 years ago. So I convert Gbit Ethernet from the fiber ONT via MoCa into (TV) coax in the attic and then use another MoCa modem to convert back to Ethernet from the former TV antenna socket in the living room. From there it goes into a professional firewall with access points and wired Ethernet behind that.

These MoCa cable modems are even available as 2.5 Gbit/s variants these days and up to 16 devices can share a COAX medium, so it works quiet well with shared TV coax cabling in houses with multiple tenants.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/goCoax-Eth...sprefix=gocoax+moca+2+5+adapter,aps,57&sr=8-3

It resembles old fat Ethernet in many ways with the MAUIs, coming to think of it...

Be aware that you'd need at least two such devices in a scenario like that, but I'm pretty sure your use case is more like #2.