Wifi extending vs. coax questions

[edy]

I have a friend who lives in a new narrow modern townhouse, 4 stories and possibly floors are concrete or metal. He has a cable-modem hooked up to the coax on the 2nd floor, which has a WiFi built-in. However, he can barely get WiFi signal to his 3rd floor, and nothing to the 4th. I'm not sure why. So he bought himself various WiFi extenders and none have helped.

I asked and he does have the coax running throughout the house, with jacks on every floor. He's not planning on wiring up Cat-5 so I thought maybe one solution would be to use the existing coax to run networking up and down the floors to other "WiFi" access points on each floor.

Does anyone have experience or suggestions with this? The existing coax already has a signal on it (from the Cable TV/Internet provider Rogers in Canada). Would you be able to use the same coax to run networking signals using coax-ethernet converters (MoCA adapter) or would the signal from the Cable TV service provider interfere with the signal used by the MoCA adapter?

If the signals do interfere, we would have to find the main splitting point where the main coax input enters the house and then is split into the 4 or 5 cables that run to each part of the house. We would isolate the rest of the coax to the other floors and connect them to each other separately from the main input that would only go to the TV/cable modem.

However I was hoping to be able to just plug the ethernet jack out of the cable-modem straight into a MoCA adapter but if there is only one coax jack per floor, how am I supposed to "bridge" into the rest of the coax connections? If the same coax can handle everything then it would be a matter of splitting up the coax and connecting one to the cable-modem adapter, hooking up ethernet out of the cable-modem into a MocA adapter, and then the other "split" of the coax into the MoCA adapter. So there would be another frequency running along the same coax for the MoCA traffic that doesn't interfere at all with the services provided by the cable TV provider.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. We would need hardware able to be purchased in Canada. I'm not sure if BestBuy carries this stuff or if Amazon would be an option, so if you have any suggestions that would be good. A couple of MoCA adapters to convert would be needed at each end (2nd and 4th floor) and also another WiFi access point on the 4th floor should do it. Then hopefully signals will reach enough. He will have to set up connections to either one of the WiFi access points (either the one on the 2nd floor or 4th) depending on which one has the best signal on the floor he is.

I forgot to add... is there a cheaper option? Amazon has something called the "eero" WiFi mesh but it seems expensive. Then again, there are big variations in cost of MoCA adapters and if you have to get a WiFi router as well it adds up. Are there MoCA adapters that have WiFi built in, or one that is only for converting plug-in ethernet to coax, and then on the 4th floor a combo device with WiFi access built into it?

Are powerline adapters better, cheaper, more reliable?
 

[fordem]

Take a look at powerline networking, and powerline based WiFi extenders.

https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-PowerLINE-1000-802-11ac-Gigabit/dp/B01929V7ZG/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=powerline+Wifi&qid=1616113111&sr=8-5

Essentially what you're doing is connecting a powerline device to the router on the second floor and install a powerline WiFi extender on each of the other floors (or as required) - the powerline uses the a/c wiring to transmit the network signal.

Powerline is not recommended in a business environment, and may be problematic in an apartment building, but this is largely due to the use of three phase power and the potential for electrical interference, in a residential townhouse, it should be fine.

[ejeffrey]

I'd also recommend checking out power line networking.  Performance will depend on your electrical wiring but if it works it should be reliable and get more consistent performance than wifi.  It's also relatively cheap.  I used this for a while and it was great.  Then I moved my router and had to plug it into a different outlet on a different circuit and it was terrible.  But if you can find a configuration that works for you, its going to be the most cost effective decent performance way to extend a network.

Mesh networks should also work fine for this, as long as you have enough nodes.  You need more than you think -- for instance 1 per floor near the stairs and one by the cable modem/router.  For a 4 story townhouse that would be a minimum of 5 nodes.  Ideally each node would be in line of site to its uplink node.

I have used both Eero and google wifi, both work fine and are easy to set up and use and generally good performance.  They also have decent spouse-approval-factor.  Note that google has both "google WiFI" and "nest Wifi" the latter has a smart speaker built in to each node.  If you don't want that make sure to stick with the cheaper speaker free version.

Ideally a mesh router would be tri-band -- with both 2.4 and 5 GHz radios for clients and a separate 5 GHz radio dedicated for uplink on a different channel.  This allows each access point to use non-interfering 5 GHz channels for clients.  Unfortunately this is relatively rare and expensive.  The Eero pro access points are tri-band but the regular Eero and the google wifi are not.

The best way is obviously to run cat-5 and use multiple hard wired access points but this can be quite difficult.

[Monkeh]

CATV operates <1GHz pretty universally, as I understand it, and MoCA for LAN setups (channels D1-D8) is >1150MHz, so there's no conflict there. Current standards are also designed to interoperate with DOCSIS - although DOCSIS 3.0 and below are also below 1GHz, for the same reason CATV is.

Add a filter at the point of entry (usually called a PoE filter for that reason, and may already be fitted), and just add MoCA adapters where needed. They're a little spendy but far superior to powerline garbage, let alone wifi mesh when wifi isn't working..

Quick picks from searching:

https://www.amazon.ca/SNLP-1GCW-Filter-Eliminate-Multi-Room-Interference/dp/B07SLD9QPH
https://www.amazon.ca/Translite-MoCA-Gigabit-Ethernet-Ports/dp/B08PMRCQV1
https://www.amazon.ca/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethernet/dp/B088KV2YYL
https://www.amazon.ca/Ethernet-Adapter-1-4Gbps-Gigabit-HLA4205/dp/B07D8Y4N5J

The firmware and wifi on these is probably hot garbage, and they're a little bandwidth constrained compared to the MoCA 2.0 and 2.5 devices above, but they're cheaper:
https://www.amazon.ca/Actiontec-Dual-Band-Wireless-Extender-WCB3000N01/dp/B00FKTMWDE

Oh, and the existing craptacular gateway unit might even do MoCA itself, saving you one device.