Actiontec MI424WR - a cheap MoCA bridge for all! - Page 33

Anyone know where can I buy a point of entry filter (other than eBay)? I want to filter the MoCA signal so it won't go into my antenna.

Also, would my network work?

Wondering if this would work:

Setup: using the MI424WR as a moca bridge connected to a gigabit router, and then having 3 ECB220's in each room.

My question is: Is it worth it to feed multiple lines from the MI424WR (i.e. 3) to the router, instead of just a single cable? In other words, can each physical connection from the MI424WR to the router be used when there are multiple ECB2200's accessing the MI424WR at once?

Thanks for any input you can share!

I'm considering to change over ALL my wireless HTPCs to MoCA since there is CATV wiring to every room already. However, that CATV wiring is currently being used for a weak and barely adequate terrestrial VHF/UHF signal. That means I want as little signal loss as possible. I will need to split the signal, one to go to my HTPC and one to go to the MI424WR. Splitters split evenly at 3.5dB loss (I think). Would I be better off using a Dish Network diplexer and connecting MoCA to the satellite input/outputs of it? I have seen "insertion loss" specs on diplexers of around 1.5dB. Would using a diplexer instead of a splitter result in less signal loss to my terrestrial signal?

Thanks for the confirmation!
I wish I had the foresight to keep the dozen or so diplexers I had from my Dish days. I ended up unloading them for next to nothing on eBay last year when I thought I'd never have another use for them!

I'm just curious, in real world usage, how much of a difference is there among recommended splitters/diplexers/filters? It seems like many people just configure an mi424wr or plug in a moca adapter and be done with it. But others insist on full spectrum splitters and diplexers and filters. In other words, if a home is already wired for cable using 5-1000 mhz splitters (as most homes are), how much of a difference in throughput would it make to change those splitters to 2ghz splitters, adding diplexers, and moca filters?

I have a rev E, and am stuck at trying to open the darn case. Removed the two screws, but apparently there is some type of release also. I tried prying it open, but afraid I'd break something. Any suggestions?

Ben

Why are you wanting to get into it?
It's actually pretty easy to open once you figure out the trick. A plastic cell phone opening tool works really well, but I think you could use a scrap credit card or some other plastic tool as well. Try to wedge this tool between the silver bezel and black casing. you will want to try to lift the silver part up and forward at the the same time. Slide your tool across the gap and the bezel should loosen on that side, then repeat for the other side and it should pop right off. Then there are 3 screws under the bezel on the bottom in addition to the 2 you already removed. Separate the 2 halves of the black casing from the front as there are clips on the back.

Thanks for the info on opening it. Finally got it open. I was having an intermittent problem where it would work fine for a while, and then stop working - and I discovered that just touching the power in connector would cause it to reboot and then work fine (for a while). So I was hoping to find an obvious loose connection at that point or something. Don't see anything now that it's open, but I'll resolder the connections at that point and see what happens.

I've been using several MI424WR's for MoCA distribution for a couple of years without problem. However, yesterday I had my Cox cable service upgraded to Trio (whole-home DVR), and now I can't get my Actontec units to recognize a coax signal. They installed some kind of filter or attenuator between the wall outlet and the cable modem. If I take this off and connect the wall outlet directly to an Actiontec, it still won't see a signal. If I hook to Actiontecs together with a plain coax cable they see each other just fine. I think Cox also installed an active amplifier at the Point of Entry, since we had poor signal strength. Cable TV and cable modem are working fine. I've tried to find a solution in this forum and elsewhere but I haven't been able to find anything relevant. Does anyone out there have any ideas? Thanks!

You might be out of luck with MoCA. Trio apparently uses >860MHz for HD programming while MoCA needs 850-1500MHz, so it looks like they would interfere. MoCA 1.1 can use 500-1500MHz, so maybe upgrading to MI424WRs that are Rev F and newer might work. That will depend on whether Cox is using the lower frequencies or not.

Wow, that's bad news. I don't have any Rev F level units on hand to try. My house is very hard-wire unfriendly and seems to have poor Wifi range, so MoCA was working really well for me. I'd just set up one of my MI424WRs to do wireless access point as well as MoCA and it helped my Wifi coverage. Any other alternatives, short of downgrading the Cox service? Powerline? Something else? Thanks!

Although this article doesn't say how, it seems to imply that some HD DVRs compatible with Trio have MoCA, so somehow there is a way to get MoCA working with Trio.
http://www.cedmagazine.com/news/2010/05/cox-debuts-new-ui%2C-whole-home-dvr%2C-plus-package-tier
However, it does say the MoCA in that particular DVR is 1.1.

Here's a forum post where someone mentioned having Trio and the cable guy installed MoCA filters.
http://www.sandiegohdtv.org/forums/thread-cox-plus-package?page=5

You might call Cox and see if anyone there has any knowledge of MoCA filters.
If there is just no way to make MoCA work, then only a couple options I can think of.
1. Try some Rev F MoCA 1.1 units.
2. Powerline network, although I have read MoCA is faster and more reliable than even 500Mbps powerline.

There used to be such a thing as a phone line network, it was called HomePNA I think, but I don't hear much about it any more.

No good on the higher channel (8). Thanks anyway. Is it feasible to fish ethernet cable down from the attic, to both the first and second floors, alongside the existing coax runs? Or use the coax as a pull-thru? Or....?

Amen. At each MoCA location, the first thing connected to the jack should be a diplexer - or a splitter if the Trio also needs the high band - with the filter on the output of the splitter in the line to the Trio, leaving the Actiontec at each location connected to the wire in the wall without a filter in the way.

However, if it's like the filters used with DSL modems that are supposed to be in the line to every device but the DSL modem, you could do a second split after the first one, put the filter on the output of that splitter that doesn't go to the Trio, and hope that the Trio and the Actiontec don't interfere with each other.

If the only thing on those jacks are the Trios and the Actiontecs, try simply connecting them to the wall jacks through a splitter, put the filters on the Trios' outputs to the TVs, and see what happens.
Edited by Philnick - 7/31/12 at 8:08am

Two MI424WRs plugged directly into wall coax outlets still can't see a coax connection. There are 4 Trio boxes on the system (I probably should disconnect them all to test, but don't know if I'll bother) but there are no filters in line between the 2 MI424WRs. Interestingly, the filter on my cable modem says it rejects 1125 - 3000 MHz & passes 5 - 1002 MHz. Unless the signal actually passes through the filter, nothing will be filtered out, right? They can't work at remote locations on the coax network, right? Unless there's also some filter on the whole network at the POE. But I thought that would be to isolate my house's coax from the rest of the world. So it seems like there's interference from the Trio boxes, I guess.

Just ordered a couple of 200Mbs Powerline adapters to test. Might have to use the MI424WRs (C,D,Es) for WAPs to extend my Wifi, maybe sell off a few.

Any other thoughts? Thanks!

Unless a link goes through the filter, it can't affect the link - so a point of entry filter would not affect connectivity within the house.

Uness band usage by either the Trios or the Actiontecs can be changed so they're at different frequencies, you're probably out of luck - the Trios appear to be jamming the Actiontecs.

I've been successfully running a MoCA link between a pair of Verizon FiOS Actiontecs: one in my second-floor apartment fed internet connectivity by an old Linksys WiFi router plugged into my Comcast cable modem, and one in my basement theater, with my Roku and my blu-ray players plugged into it.

It has run mostly uneventfully since last September, but a few weeks ago the link from the Linksys to the upstairs Actiontec - which is simply 20 feet of ethernet cable - went down and neither box could see each other though they were plugged directly into each other. Unplugging and replugging each end of that cable didn't solve the problem The computer plugged into the same router could get on the net and could print to the networked printer.

Ultimately, I solved the problem by power-cycling the Linksys. It happened again a few days later, so I tried that first, and it worked.

I've taken to making sure I can see the downstairs Actiontec from my upstairs computer before going downstairs to play in the theater, particularly since I'm now running a DLNA server on the upstairs computer to make its music and photos available in the theater.

The problem hasn't recurred, but I'm wondering if I should replace the Linksys just to be safe. I've never heard of just one jack on a router acting like that!

Any thoughts?

My quick-and-dirty solution to one of the Linksys' ethernet jacks occasionally not working without a power cycle of the Linksys was to swap jacks between the line to the Actiontec (which had been on that jack) and my simple switch that connects less-frequently used devices, since that switch is on the floor outside the computer desk, so I can easily see its status lights. If that jack acts up again, I'll see that the lights on the switch look different from usual, and even if I don't all that equipment is in the same room as the Linksys, making a quick curative power-cycle much less of a problem.

As long as the problem was with the jack in the Linksys and not caused by connecting it to the Actiontec, I'm all set.

If the theater connection goes down again, it'll suggest an incompatibility, and I'll either have to replace the old Linksys or connect the Actiontec through the switch to isolate it from the Linksys (probably the latter).

Given that it took over half a year for the problem to occur, and then it only happened twice, I'm reluctant to buy new hardware to deal with it. I have an old motto about the difficulty of diagnosing intermittent problems - "You can't fix it if it won't stay broken."
Edited by Philnick - 8/2/12 at 1:29am

How can I test my MoCA connection speed? I have a Win XP Pro SP3 desktop connected through my main router to my second-floor FiOS Actiontec, and can plug an ethernet cable from my laptop (same OS) into the FiOs Actiontec in my basement theater.

But I don't know what software to run to test out the connection speed. I've used internet speed tests, and find that the connection in the basement is the same speed - 25mbps, which I know is really 12mbps with small file compression to make test sites give flattering numbers - as at the router plugged into the Comcast Xfinity cable modem.

But I've started using a flea-weight DLNA server from SourceForge.net called oShare, which has no problem feeding iTrax.com's 5.1 surround 96/24 FLACs to my Oppo - but that's only asking the network to stream at 4 and a half Mbps - which even WiFi G can do easily.

However, I'm looking to stream 1080 24p and 30p videos with 48/16 PCM stereo soundtracks I make with my DSLR (if I can figure out how to resolve the codec incompatibility - Canon's MOV files are decidedly non-standard and require obscure shareware helper files to play them smoothly on a computer (a fact Canon doesn't acknowledge). The Oppo can't play them at all.

Lots of comments have been posted here about folks' connection speeds across their MoCA networks, I'm hoping someone will point me to something (hopefully free or cheap) that I can use to figure out how fast my network is.

Everything I have has jacks rated at 10/100, so there's need to worry about specialized software to evaluate gigabit speeds!

Thanks, xnappo! That'll give me something to chew on for a little while.

I hope I don't have to compile Jperf, as mentioned in the readme in its zip file, since I don't have a compiler - or is that so that it can be run without needing Java?

PS I've been singing the praises of MoCA and this thread in the Oppo BDP-93 thread, since I just got one and have been playing with oShare to turn my main machine into a jukebox DLNA server for the Oppo. Before this I had been using a Roku DLNA server called Plex, but - pretty as it is, and it is mighty pretty on screen - my Roku audio connection is optical SPDIF, since my AVR is pre-HDMI, limiting the sound quality to lossy Dolby Digital.

Using the Oppo, I've got the benefit of its dynamite multichannel analog audio output. Since oShare does no transcoding, the Oppo is playing the original files, including 96khz / 24bit sampled 5.1 immersive stage-perspective live recordings made by AIX records and sold as downloads by iTrax, its sister site. Interestingly, as heavy-duty as that sounds, I've computed that it needs less than 4.5mbps transfer speed, so it's trivial for MoCA to send it to the Oppo - even WiFi G could handle that easily if it had the needed range and penetration!

Where it will get tricky will be with 1080 p30 DSLR videos with stereo 48/16 PCM soundtracks - and there I've got a big mountain to climb in converting the non-standard Canon MOVs to something that the Oppo understands!

I have a question about my MoCA set up. I have 3 actiontec's and all are working fine. What I want to know is: Is everything handled by the Main router such as port forwards or do I need to add those to the other actiontecs also? And if I add my old DIR-655 to the main router to be a switch will the 1st unit have to send info first to the main router and then to the 2nd unit or will the transfers occur only in the DIR-655?

Everything is handled by the main router. Your ActionTecs are just set up as bridges.
I'm not sure I understand your 2nd question. If you have an old router set up to be a switch, it won't do any routing so it should just work as a regular switch.

I need some help and the more I read the more I get confused. My Internet can be sooo slow at times

I have FIOS triple play with the quantum speed of 50/25, 1 TIVO PREMIERE, ONE FIOS DVR and I have the MI424WR Gig Router

Main Cable line goes to the basement where it is split to a 3-way slitter 5-1000MHz one of the ports say 3.5 db and the other two ports say 7.5db

I go the Actiontech hooked up to the 3.5db

From there I have just about everything hooked up wired except the laptops. I had a second Actiontech router unstairs for MoCA use but it just died and i just ordered an actiontech ECB2500C to replace that second dead actiontech router.

the ECB2500C will have to be split again when it goes to my bedroom. I was using a 2-way 5-1000MHz splitter with the second actiontech router that died. should I also replace that slitter with a bigger number on the MHz????

I read the specs on the ECB2500C and it says it works on 5-1500MHz. This is where my confusion starts. What about the 5-1000MHz splitter I have down the basement? Shouldn't I replace it with something that says 5-1500Mhz? I been looking everywhere and i've found Monster 2Ghz spitters but they say they are for satellite. http://www.amazon.com/Monster-TGHZ-4RF-Gigahertz-Splitters-Satellite/dp/B00003CWG4/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1344876965&sr=1-10&keywords=monster+splitter


I also found in amazon a 5-1200MHz splitter http://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Broadband-unbalanced-enabling-5-1200MHz/dp/B004JKSIY2/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1344876913&sr=1-1&keywords=moca+splitter

I've read about the word "diplex" instead of slitters???????? more confusion.

Can anybody explain this stuff to me barny style and give me links to what product spitter/diplex I should purchase etc.