55% of US households now subscribe to at least one video streaming service, like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. When you’re trying to watch your favorite show on the TV in the living room, bedroom, or family room, you might experience the limitation of your WiFi network. Or maybe your WiFi signal just isn’t as strong upstairs or down in the basement where the kids want to set up their gaming console.
The simple fact is that homes are getting larger and we’re connecting more devices and demanding more from our wireless networks. Sometimes, a single wireless router isn’t enough to cover the entire home with a fast and reliable wireless signal.
Sometimes, wires are the solution for better WiFi. But many existing homes do not have Ethernet wiring or have limited Ethernet networking, and expanding Ethernet cables in the walls is labor intensive and costly. Fortunately, there’s another wired networking solution that uses the existing coax (cable TV) cables that are already in your home. This technology is called MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance).
A MoCA network uses spectrum between 500MHz and 1.5GHz and is designed to not interfere with traditional cable TV service.
A MoCA-based wireless network extender uses coax cabling to travel throughout the home. This enables you to benefit from the reliability and high speed of cables, instead of relying solely on wireless signals.
You can add a WiFi extender near the area of your home that needs a wireless boost – you just need a coax jack nearby. The extender takes the wired network signal and converts it to a strong wireless signal in the new area.
As an added bonus, a newer network extender can even give a major performance boost to your home network by adding the fast speeds of 802.11ac. Even if your wireless router doesn’t support 802.11ac, you can still add an 802.11ac network extender to your home and upgrade your home to the latest technology.