1Gbps@10ms network in a 100 year old house
This year marks my Seattle home’s 100st birthday! Hurray! 🥳🎉
Moving from a brand new high-rise downtown apartment to a 100-year-old house in the suburbs brought dozens of little challenges.
One of the most interesting was configuring a home network capable of supporting the two nearly-always-on video conferencing feeds of my wife and I as we continue to work remotely through the COVID pandemic and late-night low-latency gaming binges into a house originally built with only knob-and-tube electricity!
Previous Home Network
Our previous home network was sweet! An Ethernet connection came up directly from the ISP to an in-apartment closet. From the closet, into a router, then again back into the closet to Ethernet outlets in every room.
Spending six to eight hours on video conference calls during the day, watching Twitch streams in the evening and playing latency-sensitive games at night, we both enjoyed the hard-wired connection’s 900Mb up/900Mb down at < 1ms latency.
Old House — No Ethernet!
Contrast our previous apartment with our new (to us) 100 year old house: no Ethernet, thick plaster walls extremely effective at blocking an 802.11ac WiFi signal, and only one ISP-active CoAX port which meant limited flexibility.
We came up with a hack to at least get online, but it involved gross latency and 100ft of dusty (?how that happens is beyond me?) Ethernet cable from a local Ace hardware store strewn across the living room and down a hallway for a few weeks while I figured out a better solution. Something like this:
While we paid for a 1 Gigabit connection from our ISP, only the two hard-wired computers on the first floor were getting anything near that, pulling ~900Mbps down/40Mbps up at 7ms.
The second floor PC and laptop was able to pull 18Mbps at 48ms, just barely enough for a video call, but only if someone else wasn’t using the network to watch TV.
The WiFi signal wasn’t enough to stream 1080p video to our TV or anywhere except standing within 15ft of the router because of plaster walls on the first floor. If I was playing games and the TV was on, both would buffer and drop packets.
Being cable cutters using internet for all entertainment, we needed a better solution.
WiFi6
My first thought was to stay wireless in most places of the house and get a fancy WiFi6 mesh network. I was primarily worried about latency while gaming, though, but short of getting a low voltage contractor to hook up Ethernet to the house, it seemed like the only option.
MoCA
Luckily, an off-hand comment by my wife wondering if it was possible to have multiple modems, one in each office, led me down a Google rabbit hole to discover tech I hadn’t ever heard of before: MoCA.
MoCA adapters convert CoAX to Ethernet. This could be useful, since even though there was only one live CoAX connection in the house at the moment, by testing the various random CoAX ports and cables in the basement I found that there was dead CoAX lines for TV service that ran to most rooms.
I was skeptical that the extra hops through a device type with only a few not-so-well-known manufacturers would introduce a lot of latency, but I figured I’d give it a try for the promise of wired internet.
Solution: Both!
I opted for a solution with both WiFi6 to penetrate the thick plaster walls from the basement to the second floor, then 3 MoCA adapters for a low-latency wired connection for gaming and video conferencing.
The plan was to move the existing single live CoAX port from the first floor to the basement, terminate there with a modem, then use the other dead CoAX lines the house already had for TV to run an internet signal up to the second floor. It ended up looking something like this:
Dry Run
To check that everything worked well together before disconnecting service, I did a (messy) dry run with some patch cables and was satisfied.
Installation — Moving the live CoAX port
One final hurdle was to move the single live CoAX port in the house to a location close to a line that ran to both first and second floor offices.
…which unfortunately involved rooting around in a crawlspace under the house fit for a horror movie opening scene.
Crawling around over some leftover junk from a previous tenant’s renovation, I found the disconnected line that runs up through the house using a CoAX continuity tester (like this), wired everything up and ran some speed tests.
Speed Comparison: 4ms wired latency penalty with MoCA
Before (with no MoCA): 913Mbps@7ms
After (through MoCA): 916Mbps@11ms:
I ran 3 tests before and after, all with consistent results: adding MoCA came at about a 4ms latency penalty, which is way better than I was expecting and still plenty fast for what we need.
Overall I’m really happy with how the network turned out! Would recommend MoCA to anyone as an option to re-use existing CoAX connections for home internet.
