MoCA taps for gold in coax

Alliance expands home networking�s QoS and bandwidth capabilities

Telecommunications Online
http://www.telecommagazine.com/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_3952
02-12-08, By Sean Buckley

For all the bandwidth you have in the last mile, it will be nothing if the home wiring is not up to snuff. Some service providers have and will install new Cat 5 cabling into a home, but that approach is one that�s hard to scale.

Instead, many service providers are extending the utility of either the existing phone lines (home phone networking alliance) or HFC cabling (multimedia over coax alliance). Fueled by the high bandwidth needs of large telcos such as Verizon, which is using it as their standard home networking technology, MoCA has upped the ante of its capabilities with new PQoS (parameterized quality of service) features and consumer devices.

In the following Audiocast, Telecommunications Executive Editor Sean Buckley talks to Dr. Anton Monk, board member of the MoCA (multimedia over coax alliance) and CTO & Co-Founder of Entropic Communications.

In the Audiocast, Monk addresses these questions:

While the ultimate medium for any home network would be a fiber or run all new Cat 5 in a house, those approaches do have a lot of costs associated with them, so many service providers are using either existing phone lines, coax, powerlines and wireless. How has MoCA, which uses a home�s existing coax, stand up against the competition and do you see continued momentum around using existing wiring concepts growing?

Verizon has chosen MoCA respectively. Do you see their use of MoCA as validation for the existing HFC approach?

MoCA has now put out 1.1 extension of the standard, which includes PQoS (parameterized quality of service) for bandwidth management and an increase in network size from the current eight nodes to 16 nodes. What are the elements of the 1.1 extension and what are the benefits from a customer point of view?

You mentioned the notion of QoE (Quality of Experience). What�s your definition of QoE?

Click here to listen to the Audiocast.