MOCA Making Cable Networking a Reality

ARTICLE DATE:  01.05.06
SOURCE: PC MAG.com

By  Lance Ulanoff

Now, just one year after the Multimedia Over Coax Alliance announced (at CES 2005) plans to develop and certify products that use in-home coaxial cables to network home entertainment devices, the alliance is showing the technology in practice and the first products to actually use the technology.

The MOCA concept is simple and, for some consumers, particularly alluring. It relies not on new wiring, but existing and sometime pervasive coaxial cable wiring in homes to deliver high-definition content from PC to room and offer live 100-megabit network connections wherever coaxial cable connections exist in the home.

Eric Buffkin demonstrated Motorola's new high-definition, MOCA ready QTP6416 DVR, which was announced just days ago, and how, while it has an Ethernet port, was actually receiving an IP-based high-def video from a video server connected to the DVR over a standard coax line. There was also a Linksys cable networking router that, while not yet available to end users, can take a standard WAN connection in and output network connectivity to several coax lines.

The MOCA group expects to being the product certification process within the next few months and consumers should soon see coax networking products, like Actiontec's M1424WR home gateway, in retail stores and from service providers like Verizon, DiSH networks and others.

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