coax to ethernet adapters

[bikemig]

I moved recently to an old brick house and found out that brick doesn't play nicely with wifi, . I've put some wifi repeaters in different parts of the house. They help a bit and turned an intolerable situation to a somewhat tolerable one. Running ethernet through the house is just too expensive. So i've been reading about coax to ethernet adapters. Does anyone have any experience with these things? They make a lot of sense since most homes are wired for ethernet and it seems to give a reliable wired connection.

 

[Rickster71]

Haven't use the Coax adapters.
Just a thought, have you taken a look at something like this? Even easier to install than coax.
Review: Netgear Powerline Nano 500 Set (XAVB5101) - Network - HEXUS.net
One of the fastest power line adapters.

 

[bikemig]

Yeah I've thought about powerline adapters but this is an old house. The upstairs still has tube and knob wiring; I'm skeptical that it will play nicely with powerline adapters, lol.

The real problem is that the main feed into the house is in the family room which has been added to the house. The interior wall of the family room is brick and it's making the wifi feed worthless. Maybe the right solution is to drill a hole through the brick interior wall and run an ethernet cable to a wifi repeater. That way the interior of the house should get a decent signal.

But the coax to ethernet adapters are supposed to work well and the price is right, Amazon.com: Actiontec Ethernet to Coax Adapter Kit for Homes with Cable TV Service (ECB2500CK01): Computers & Accessories

 

[Rickster71]

I found a link thanks to BoredSysAdmin, that compares five of the home power adapters:
HomePlug AV 500 Adapter Roundup - SmallNetBuilder
Hope this helps a bit.

 

[bikemig]

I found a link thanks to BoredSysAdmin, that compares five of the home power adapters:
HomePlug AV 500 Adapter Roundup - SmallNetBuilder
Hope this helps a bit.

This is very useful; thanks for the link. I've used SmallNetBuilder before and it's a great resource. One problem with coax to ethernet is that it apparently only works with cable.

This is a bit dated but useful as a starting place if you have older wiring in the house like I do:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?pagewanted=all

 

[Rickster71]

Yeah I've thought about powerline adapters but this is an old house. The upstairs still has tube and knob wiring; I'm skeptical that it will play nicely with powerline adapters, lol.

The real problem is that the main feed into the house is in the family room which has been added to the house. The interior wall of the family room is brick and it's making the wifi feed worthless. Maybe the right solution is to drill a hole through the brick interior wall and run an ethernet cable to a wifi repeater. That way the interior of the house should get a decent signal.

But the coax to ethernet adapters are supposed to work well and the price is right, Amazon.com: Actiontec Ethernet to Coax Adapter Kit for Homes with Cable TV Service (ECB2500CK01): Computers & Accessories

Wow, knob & tube wiring. That should be interesting.
The power adapters don't appear to use a ground...so they may be OK with K&T wiring.

I like your idea of drilling a hole and running an Ethernet cable.
If you do decide to use the coax adapters, I'd suggest to use a quad shield RG-6.

Good luck, keep us posted. I'm interested to see how you make out.

Rick

 

[bikemig]

So far so good. I bought a pair of net gear power line adapters: Amazon.com: Netgear XAVB5101 Powerline Nano500 Set(XAVB5101): Computers & Accessories. I set it up and so far it is working great. The HT room is an addition to the house and the interior of the HT room is brick as it was once the outside wall of the house. Needless to say the brick works like a charm in degrading the wifi signal into the house from the HT room, . I had been relying on a pair of apple express airport base stations as wifi extenders (one for each floor of the house). That kind of worked but the extenders also degraded the network. So now I have my wife's computer connected via ethernet and a powerline adapter which allowed me to take one of the wifi extenders out of the chain. I'll keep the other one since I also use it to stream music via airplay to my stereo system.

 

[Grador]

If the powerline networking is doing the trip you may venture to grab one of these in the future if you want to get a little better LAN performance on your wireless devices.

XAVNB2001