Ethernet over Coax

[robinc]

This may be daft - but - we're buying a house that has a TV coax point in every room. My guess is that somewhere in the loft there's going to be a hub of some sort - still waiting for info about that. Now I know you can do ethernet over coax and I do remember with great <insert feeling> the fun I had back in the early 90s working in a local secondary school complex with RM PCs and miles of coax for the network.

What I have in mind is using these to feed wireless access points as an alternative to our current Tenda mesh system.

Just wondering if anyone here has done anything along these lines?

[Bill]

Now I know you can do ethernet over coax

I wouldn't recommend it...

During the mid to late 1980s, this was the dominant 10 Mbit/s Ethernet standard.

My bold.

[isirate]

I have an area of my house where it is difficult to run cat5/6 structured cabling.

Pre existing tv coax existed to where my networking cab is located. I run gocoax moca 2.5 adaptors on this link and it syncs at a PHY rate of 3500Mbps no problem. These are 2.5GE on the Ethernet side too.

My network is 2.5GE but currently I only have a 1GE switch on the far side of the gocoax, I can fill it up to full GigE line rate no problem (have not tested if they get to the full 2.5g). Latency across this coax link is approx 4ms

They seem stable and this is just off the bog standard TV cable that was pre installed.

You can find them on Amazon

https://www.gocoax.com/ma2500d

[robinc]

Hmmm.......... interesting!

[nowster]

10Base2 was Ethernet over coax (10 Mbps). Almost nobody uses it any more.

However, TV coax is 75 ohm impedance and Ethernet coax is 50 ohm impedance. It might work if you have good quality coax (eg. CT100 used for satellite dish connections), but you'll need to be careful about termination.

My suggestion? Use the existing cables to pull some CAT6 cable through the ducts.

[robinc]

My suggestion? Use the existing cables to pull some CAT6 cable through the ducts.

Now there's a thought..........

[isirate]

10Base2 was Ethernet over coax (10 Mbps). Almost nobody uses it any more.

However, TV coax is 75 ohm impedance and Ethernet coax is 50 ohm impedance. It might work if you have good quality coax (eg. CT100 used for satellite dish connections), but you'll need to be careful about termination.

My suggestion? Use the existing cables to pull some CAT6 cable through the ducts.

It would be crazy to attempt 10-Base-2 in 2024.
But as I say above it is possible to run Ethernet over TV coax using Moca Adaptors, and >1Gbps is easily achievable.

I'd love to use the coax to pull Cat6 but in my case sadly not easy as not ducted, and so runs the risk of losing the cat6 mid pull resulting in neither coax nor cat6

[zappaDPJ]

I'd love to use the coax to pull Cat6 but in my case sadly not easy as not ducted, and so runs the risk of losing the cat6 mid pull resulting in neither coax nor cat6

I've just spent the last couple of days doing exactly that. Our property had up to two coax and three landline points in every virtually every room. Talk about overkill! I soldered and wrap the joints in gorilla tape first and I was able to pull everything through. I do know from having to hack away some plasterboard that some of it was ducted so that did help get the job done.

Wiring up the faceplates proved to be more of an awkward challenge though

[isirate]

I've just spent the last couple of days doing exactly that.

Nice work!