No New Wires -- The Other Way to Bring Your Electronic Home to Life

Posted by Avi Rosenthal on Dec 29, 2005

A technology gap exists today. The haves and the have-nots. No, I am not talking about computer access for the poor, albeit a serious topic, I am talking about the wired and the non-wired. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a home that was wired with Cat 5, but most of us are not. What's to be done? Are the rest of us destined to use nothing but unsecured, unreliable wireless? How can the gap be closed? Well, I set out to answer just that question.

I live in a relatively new home, about seven years old, which is not wired with Cat 5 to all of the rooms, but we are a very tech-happy family and having only three computers with Internet access was starting to get on everyone's nerves. We have wireless, but for some of the desktops, this is just not an option, my kids needed more speed for on-line gaming and downloading.

I started by looking at all of the "standards" that exist under the "No New Wires" convention of networking. You may have heard about this, it is the idea that you can have it all, at least all the bandwidth, without adding any new wires behind the walls of your home. There is HomePlug, whose new standard, HomePlug A/V can send over 200Mbps through the powerlines in your house (currently being tested). There is also, IPTV, a standard that was developed by Coaxsys and delivers a consistent 100Mbps over pretty much any coax cable in any configuration, even daisy-chain, that is being installed all over the country by small operators with great success. The major cable operators are taking a hard look at the Coaxsys standard while they are developing their own. The MoCA or Multimedia over Coax Alliance is working on a standard that will deliver 270Mbps, and it is supposed to be released during the first quarter of 2006.

All of these standards and jargon are great, but I'm like most consumers: I want it all and I want it now! So I went out and got three Coaxsys adapters, the TVnet/C Pro, one "master" and two "slaves". I used one of the "slaves" for my daughter's room and the other for the computer on the desk in the kitchen. Both of these locations already had TV outlets, and the kitchen already had a TV plugged in.

All of my coax ran to a central point in my basement, which made it easy to work on. According to Coaxsys, you can plug the "master" into ANY open coax wall plate connection, and all of the others are now "on the network," so if your broadband connection is in your home office you could install the "master" there, if you had a coax connection. I prefer to have all of my wires in one location; at least my wife prefers it, as it cuts down on the clutter, so I installed mine in the room where all of the coax came together. Once you have the "master" plugged in, you have to run a Cat 5 wire from your Broadband connection, in my case my router. This connects the Ethernet to the the system. Depending on your configuration, this can be easy or a little complicated. My router is in the same closet as my coax connections, so it wasn't too hard. The system also includes a filter that you install at the entry location of the coax from the outside; it stops the Ethernet information from leaving your home and ending up on your neighbor's computer.

The adapters do not affect the TV operation at all, you simply unplug the TV from the wall, plug it into the adapter, plug the adapter into the coax and the electricity, and the computer into the adapter. Within minutes, I had the two computers up and running on the network, my router automatically assigned them IP addresses, just as if they were plugged directly into it. No other settings, switches or software. The computers operate like they were plugged directly into the router.

The speed was remarkable, by doing some internal tests I got ratings of 100Mbps between both the computers on the IPTV network and from computers on the regular Ethernet network. The fact that these two computers are connected via adapters and coax cable is completely transparent to the other computers and devices on the network. I can connect to my TiVo, music jukebox and home automation server with no problem at all.

As far as I am concerned the gap between the haves and the have-nots is closed...