Is Your WiFi Weak? Get MOCA Boxes Now!

WiFi signal strength in my house has always frustrated me, especially now that we have our AppleTV upstairs, another in the family room, my daughter streams Netflix through her Playstation downstairs, my son online games with his XBox upstairs and I am the guy who gets the brunt of everyone screaming, “Dad! The internet is really slow!“

Since I was not about to go back to the Stone Age and wire my house with ethernet, I tried every solution I could think of: Two Apple Airport Express devices as network extenders (they stream music too) and a Belkin repeater in our home theatre area. I even tried three of these powerful WiFi routers at various times but my signal strength never did boost enough to make much of a difference. All of our WiFi connected devices worked, but doing anything on them was still slow in some areas of the house and our TV streaming quality was almost always crappy (especially if we were all online watching streaming TV and on our iPads, iPhones or computers).

MOCA boxes are inexpensive.
A 2-pack at Amazon is $115

Over dinner one night with our brides, I began whining to my brother-in-law about my wireless troubles (he owns Audio by Design in Minneapolis, a high-end installer). He chuckled and then said to me, “Why not install MOCA devices?” I had NO idea what he was talking about and, after he gleefully pointed out he finally had something about technology he could tell me, he told me all about why MOCA was so good, how it was so much better than ethernet over powerline, and that using WiFi repeaters like I had done in my house simply weren’t effective.

Turns out that there is so much available frequency capacity in the coax cable that runs throughout most homes that it’s trivial to piggyback on it with an ethernet protocol. The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MOCA) was started to leverage that available coax and man-oh-man…it works really well! (Read more here at Wikipedia).

It took me less than 10 minutes to hook up one box between my cable modem and the wall and the second one downstairs between my daughter’s TV and the wall (an ethernet cable then went to her Playstation for Netflix streaming). The next night she came upstairs and exclaimed, “Wow! Streaming is perfect Dad!” We then bought two more and hooked up our home theatre and our upstairs AppleTV and now we experience zero stuttering, buffering, slow connections or anything else.

Take a peek at this MOCA video to learn more about what it can do (and there are a lot more MOCA videos here):