Coax in Office - How to Get Wired Connection to Desktop?

[Jud]

I recently retired (yay!).  When I was working, I had a residential internet account through a living room coax connection and modem, and a business internet account through a coax connection and modem in the office - two separate modems.

 

Now the business account is done, but the office coax connection is still "live" and can be used with the residential account, *if* I can figure out how to connect from the office coax to my desktop PC.

 

I don't think I want two modems on the same network/account, because it's my impression they'll interfere with each other.  I was looking at MoCA adapters, but I'm thinking what they're actually for is kind of like powerline adapters - running Ethernet over coax from one MoCA adapter to others.

 

So is there anything that I can use to make a wired connection from the coax ISP outlet in the office to my PC?

[Jud]

56 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

@Jud

When you says ethernet over coax, does that mean your ISP is using Docsis 3 or 3.1 ?  
Or is your intention just to use coax internally in your home as transportation of ethernet like WiFi and a home plug. I don’t think so as you already mentioned it as a not possible option. 
 

Can you draw a diagram of your network?

 

So there is two available ISP separate available coax outside your house ?

 

Is this the same as asking “How can I reuse TV cables in my house for networking?”

 

I guess the the mentioned MoCA is the only answer. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance

 

And it can do more speed than your 1,2 GB your ISP is delivering to you.

https://www.amazon.com/MoCA-2-5-Gigabit-Ethernet-Ports/dp/B07Z3SB1HH

 

Is the intention to create a wired backhaul for your mesh maybe ?

https://nerdtechy.com/best-moca-adapter

 

https://worldwidesupply.net/blog/moca-adapters-beginners-guide/

 

 

You have just made me thinking that I can use this technology to create a separate network for audio. Using my old unused TV coax. 😀

 

Thanks - I'm terrible at the diagramming stuff, sorry.  (Though software suggestions for doing it are welcome.)

 

I don't know whether the split in the coax was inside the house (at the garage junction box?) or outside, but I have two ISP coax outlets in my home, one in the living room and one in the office.  The one in the office was used for my business account; the ISP has told me that it is available to be used for the residential account.

 

The problem with using MoCA is that it operates on a different frequency than DOCSIS (my ISP is compatible with DOCSIS 3.1 and 3.0).  So I think I would need to have at least two MoCA adapters, one at an origin point (for example, my garage network junction box) and one at the cable outlet in the office.  The adapter at the origin point would provide the Ethernet signal at the proper frequency to be picked up by the MoCA adapter in the office.  (This is the reason MoCA adapters won't, or at least should not, interfere with DOCSIS-based cable modems - different frequencies.)  That would start to make things pretty complicated in the garage, since I plan to convert from copper to optical Ethernet at that location and already have the equipment.  It would also mean at least $200 for the two MoCA adapters (two Motorola MM1025).

[Jud]

2 minutes ago, ericuco said:

As for the coax cable, could you use it to pull an Ethernet (copper or fiber) cable?

 

Even better - I just found the optical fiber outlet in the office!  It was behind a blank wall plate that was in back of the shredder, which is large enough I haven't moved it since I brought it in almost 4 years ago.  (It was the business's - the admin assistant told me to "keep it as a lovely parting gift," which was great, since heavy duty shredders aren't cheap.) Whew!  So now all I need is another relatively inexpensive optical-to-Ethernet converter and an SFP and I'm good!

[Jud]

22 hours ago, R1200CL said:

Pen and paper. Attach pictures taken with your phone.

 

If you have an iPad: Lekh Diagram

 

How do you know that fiber is active, and what type ?

 

I've attached a diagram. It differs from the current situation in that I have one fiber media converter in the living room and another in the office, but they're not receiving the signal from the Mikrotik. This is likely because the converters have SFP slots, while the Mikrotik uses SFP+. So I've decided to bite the bullet: I'm returning the converters and replacing them with two more Mikrotik switches so everything will be compatible. That's what the diagram shows.

 

[Jud]

31 minutes ago, ericuco said:

@Jud any reason for not going with fiber between Mikrotik switch and ER in living room and bypassing mesh router? Just seems to me for all the good you are doing using fiber to living room then passing it thru the mesh router is a step in the wrong direction. 

 

Hi @ericuco, the reason is that the mesh router gives me strong Wi-Fi or wired connections to the Apple TV, television, Blu-ray players for ripping SACDs or playing movies.... Smooth operation of the television with anything up through 4K programming is essential for keeping my wife happy. 🙂

[Jud]

11 hours ago, R1200CL said:

That should not be an issue. Are you using same SFP modules both places?

Also, can you test the fiber line with converters only ?

 

Have you open the web interface of the Mikrotik and verified that the SFP module(s) is present ?

 

Your drawing shows two separate fiber lines from the garage. Is that correct ?

And if so, how do you know which one goes where ?

 

4 hours ago, MarkusBarkus said:

Not 100% assured, but SFP and SFP+ cages are the same...as far as accepting either transceiver. I have used them interchangeably, same type on either end, and lower bit rate in effect, of course.
 

I also have a copper ISP and a different fiber ISP. An elementary call out, but: I have been tricked a couple of times with wifi routers and devices pointing to the wrong network somehow. I didn't ask them to!  Sorry, as I recognize that is very basic, @Jud but...

 

Thanks to both of you for good practical questions. I'll try to answer them all.

 

I only have one ISP, one account, and one home network.

 

I haven't tested the fiber line with converters only, but that's a good idea to check for compatibility between transceiver modules and FMCs.

 

Yes I have the same transceiver modules everywhere.

 

I actually have 8 fiber runs. The electrical subcontractor who installed them when the house was being built conveniently labeled each of them on both ends, 0 through 7. One being misnumbered could happen (though the subcontractor did good careful work), but misnumbering both of the two I happened to use seems unlikely.

 

When I try to open the Mikrotik web interface using their phone app, I get the message "Connection refused." The web interface on the PC also does not connect. However, the green light under the E on the Mikrotik is lit, so I believe it is getting the Ethernet connection from the router.

 

I have other reasons for changing to the Mikrotiks. It will allow me to have up to 10G wired connections, while the FMCs are only rated for 1.25G. Also, I will only have to check transceiver compatibility with one product instead of two.

[Jud]

27 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

If you have 8 fiber runs, you ought to be very lucky 😀

Wouldn't it then be best to at least have a 8 port SFF+ swich, and maybe have that one take over any DHCH.

 

Two runs each for four rooms for redundancy. So just 4 ports are needed for the foreseeable future. (The fiber itself is OM4 nominally rated for 40GB.)

 

I think it's best to have the mesh routers coordinate to assign IP addresses and handle DHCP, since along with the wired network I have 29 wireless devices IIRC, some of which are mobile. Yes, I do know about assigning fixed IP addresses and have done so in the past. These particular mesh routers seem to keep IP addresses per device constant on their own, so I haven't had to bother with doing it manually since I've had them.

 

 

 

[Jud]

40 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

Can you post a picture of your junction box ?

 

I'll do so when I'm back home later. It's quite sloppy at the moment since I've just got things hooked up to try to get them to work, not stowed away neatly.

[Jud]

15 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

Unless you have done so by intention, you only have one router that acts as a one single DHCP server.

So I expect the Asus XT8 “master”, is the one in your garage.

 

Yes that's correct.

 

Quote

You said in another post you may like a third WiFi 6 “router”. 

You can use any of the one listed here, and they should integrate nice into your present AIMesh network. 
So it doesn’t have to be an expensive XT8. (I’m using 4 Asus routers. Bought cheap second hand). 

 

True, but with 29 devices, some of which are 4K video devices, and a laptop I use to  download hi res albums and upload them to cloud backup, I like my Wi-Fi to be quite fast. These particular routers are the best I've had (with excellent coverage throughout the home) in those terms.

[Jud]

Per your request, a photo of the garage junction box.  Modem is to the left of the junction box, one of the mesh routers is above in the middle, and the Mikrotik is to the right.  (There's a white metal panel that usually fits over the box, which I'll replace when I've made provision for the various cables to run through it.)

[Jud]

I have little to no idea what goes on with my network, but I do notice that with 1.2gbps nominal download speed from the ISP, I usually get ~700mbps when testing wireless speed with my phone.

[Jud]

1 minute ago, R1200CL said:

This one ?

https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in

 

And you can’t access it ?

What OS ? RouterOS or SwOS ?

 

Yes, that's the one.  Currently can't access it, correct. Don't know which OS - is there a way to find out without accessing via the web interface?

 

(By the way, the FMCs are on their way back to Amazon already, so no testing throughput.)

[Jud]

6 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

That could be a limitation of the phone. My iPad is better than my iPhone as an example. PC being worse. (And I know why). AppleTV may get a good result. Did you test ?

 

This is real world wireless speed, not nominal.  I'm plenty happy with that.  The next phone I get should have Wi-Fi 6E and may be able to use all the wireless speed the routers can put out.

[Jud]

@R1200CL and @Duke40, great idea.  Thanks so much for the help!

[Jud]

1 minute ago, Duke40 said:

Had more trouble a few weeks ago when adding a 2nd CRS305 via 10Gbe optical connection to connect to Amplifi Alien WiFi 6 mesh, and even the above did not work. So, I was kind of doing something similar to what you will be achieving.

 

Did you set the 2nd Mikrotik's internal IP address manually or were you able to allow the router to hand it out?

[Jud]

4 hours ago, Jud said:

@R1200CL and @Duke40, great idea.  Thanks so much for the help!

 

Success. 🙂

 

I can be really dang thick, so it took me a few unsuccessful attempts to realize I was never going to connect to the Mikrotik until I turned off my laptop's Wi-Fi so I could manually change its IP address to the same network as the Mikrotik. Once I did that, Winbox64 was able to connect immediately.

 

It's an Apple laptop, but a kind soul created an Apple version of Winbox64 that happens to be suited for Catalina, which is what I'm running on the old laptop.  From there it was a matter of Googling where in the Winbox64 menu the option to boot into SwOS is buried, and once I reconnected the Mikrotik in the garage it showed up on my home network.

 

Now that I've got the procedure down, the other two Mikrotiks should be easy - they'll never see the home network until after they've been reconfigured to boot into SwOS.

[Jud]

18 hours ago, R1200CL said:

Hi @Jud

I assume you switch to fiber bachhaul. Did wireless speed improve?

Have you deployed fiber from Mikrotik to EtherRegen?

 

The other two Mikrotiks I need to make the fiber connections don't arrive until tomorrow or a bit later, so I'll find out then.

 

I suppose I could try running fiber to the EtherRegen, but at least at first I'll be connecting through the ASUS router.

[Jud]

57 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

The two next Mikrotik’ s is same CRS305, or did you choose the 610-8G-2S+IN in order to get more RJ45 ports ?

 

 

Same CRS305 - the ASUS router has 4 RJ45 ports, and currently that's more than I need.

[Jud]

On 9/4/2021 at 1:23 PM, R1200CL said:

Hi @Jud

I assume you switch to fiber bachhaul. Did wireless speed improve?

Have you deployed fiber from Mikrotik to EtherRegen?

 

On 9/5/2021 at 7:41 AM, Jud said:

 

The other two Mikrotiks I need to make the fiber connections don't arrive until tomorrow or a bit later, so I'll find out then.

 

I suppose I could try running fiber to the EtherRegen, but at least at first I'll be connecting through the ASUS router.

 

Mikrotiks arrived. This time it was easy to get them set up as switches.  I moved the mesh routers to fiber backhaul and got all 3 wireless bands onto the home network.  There are about 3 different places in the router admin WebUI that have to be tweaked to do this - they don't make it particularly convenient.

 

I could isolate the audio system to one of the 5GHz networks, but I'm lazy enough that I prefer to have one network with an algorithm steering the 30+ devices to a particular node.  If I feel like isolating the audio somewhat from wireless chatter, I can run fiber to the EtherRegen, which at this point would be quite easy and inexpensive (an optical patch cable and an SFP).  But first I'll try it as is.  I don't expect the changes I just made to alter how the system sounds, which I'm enjoying tremendously, so fiber to the ER is not a high priority.

 

In terms of performance, it's better.  Download speed to the PC is 2-3 times what it was before, which I would expect when changing from a Wi-Fi router in another room to an optical fiber connection. (I feel like buying some music just to watch how quickly it downloads! 😉)  The Wi-Fi speed to my phone is also up, noticeably though not hugely (I flipped back and forth between configurations in the router WebUI and did several speed tests both ways).

 

So I've accomplished what I set out to do, getting a more reliable, faster connection to my PC and my audio system without a huge expenditure.  Thanks again to @jabbr for giving me the idea to have the house wired with optical cable while it was being built, and to @Duke40, @R1200CL and @ericuco for helping me along the way when I got stuck. 

[Jud]

Listening for the first time since I made the changes. Obviously the power of suggestion may well be playing into this, but I'm quite liking what I'm hearing. I just may have to try optical direct into the EtherRegen.

 

I remember quite a bit of discussion a long while back on what SFPs were suited for the ER. Anyone want to tell me what you're successfully using?

[Jud]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

Listening for the first time since I made the changes. Obviously the power of suggestion may well be playing into this, but I'm quite liking what I'm hearing. I just may have to try optical direct into the EtherRegen.

 

I remember quite a bit of discussion a long while back on what SFPs were suited for the ER. Anyone want to tell me what you're successfully using?

 

It's OK, did a search and already ordered.

[Jud]

4 hours ago, Duke40 said:

@Jud i'm curious 🧐, which SFPs did you choose to order?

 

We’ll see how these work:

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01M0UKAQD?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image

[Jud]

On 9/7/2021 at 3:51 PM, Jud said:

 

We’ll see how these work:

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01M0UKAQD?ref=ppx_pt2_mob_b_prod_image

 

The answer is that they work perfectly - no muss, no fuss.  I haven't bothered to do any listening comparisons.  All I know is that the music I'm playing sounds great and I'm very happy.