With more and more channels, HD and soon 4K, service providers have thrown resources at bringing bandwidth to the door. Now their customers want complete flexibility within the home – the freedom to use a range of devices for broadband and video, anywhere, anytime.

So, all the bandwidth the network can provide needs to be made available all over the whole home all of the time. The operator has a number of choices including taking fibre or DOCSIS 3 into the home, Wi-Fi and power line, but each method has issues; namely they are either prohibitively expensive or intrinsically unreliable or, at best, inconsistent.

An economic and reliable solution for whole home bandwidth has been deployed and proven in many millions of homes across North America, Latin America, China and elsewhere. MoCA® – Multimedia over Coax Alliance, is the open standard alliance for maximising the potential of in-home coaxial networks for multimedia.

Now the solution is coming to Europe as Teleste, the Finnish video technology company, introduces its first range of Ethernet over Coax (EoC) devices, leveraging MoCA 2.0 from Entropic, the founder of the MoCA technology.

MoCA 2.0 devices offer a massive step forward in bandwidth capability with a minimum of 400Mbps provided, easily handling multiple streams of 4K video without any upgrade of the existing home network. To extend that connectivity all around the home and even the garden requires Wi-Fi and Teleste has brought to market, through its Asheridge brand, its Coax WiFi adapter which is powered by Entropic’s second generation MoCA 2.0 single chip solution, the EN2810. Entropic’s new iteration of the solution is the most compact, lowest power and most economical solution available, and maximises throughput to guarantee the most stringent QoS demands.

Alongside performance, simplicity and usability are priorities for both provider and consumer. Teleste’s Ethernet over Coax Wi-Fi adapter uses a simple plug-and-play connection to a standard Ethernet router and the in-home coax network. It enables two or more units, with a maximum of 16 devices, to be connected on the same coax network. Setting up the Wi-Fi is also easy as consumers simply connect the device into the existing router with the supplied Ethernet cable, configure the device by typing the default address into a web browser on the consumer’s laptop or tablet and follow the onscreen wizard.

“We believe the killer application for this new found speed and performance is rapidly shaping up to be high speed wireless extension throughout the customer’s property and garden,” says Jason Dando, Ethernet over Coax product manager, Teleste. “With so many Wi-Fi only devices now in consumers’ homes, operators are seeing that it is no longer good enough to just deliver high speed data to the front door, it has to go right through every part of the home and deliver that performance right into the customer’s hand.”

And he emphasises the reliability and consistent performance that is delivered by the EoC Wi-Fi adapter: “We firmly believe that high speed data and Wi-Fi is now as essential a utility in the subscriber’s home as their water and gas. So because of this it should be every bit as reliable. Imagine how unhappy subscribers would be if the electricity in their homes only worked in some of their rooms, or if the lights went dim when too many people were using them. We see Wi-Fi extension with Entropic’s MoCA 2.0 technology as the only way forward for any operator who is serious about delivering high performance broadband, video and data.”

“European operators are beginning to realise that MoCA can be the backbone of whole-home connectivity. If you use the existing wired infrastructure this adapter makes the Wi-Fi experience much better. We work with a number of leading European organizations including Teleste, Hirschmann, Triax and others to extend the in-home connectivity for the broadband and video element. As operators move to more server/client deployments they will need to extend connectivity and adapters leveraging MoCA enable QoS-backed speeds and reliability,” says Roger Gregory, VP Marketing at Entropic.

Categories: Articles