When I moved a few years ago I needed to re-think my networking architecture. At the old place I ran a lot of Cat6 cable to various access points and that provided a decent amount of coverage. The new place is both “post and beam” construction and has no crawl space, so running cables is not an easy option.

I decided I wanted a mesh network and I went to Wirecutter to see what they recommended. It turned out to be the Asus ZenWiFi XT8, so I bought a bunch of them.

Outside of the Wirecutter recommendation, I also found that there was an open source project that produces firmware for Asus products called Merlin, and a person called gnuton builds this firmware for the XT8.

Sold.

Several years later I am still fairly happy with the gear, but there was one place that struggled to get coverage - the apartment above the garage where my mother-in-law lives. I’ve tried a number of things to improve the signal, and I’m confused as to why it is so bad since it is only about a 50 foot line-of-sight distance that I’m trying to cover. While I have a synchronous, 1 gigabit per second fiber connection to the network, the best I can get from the apartment is a fraction of that speed.

Recently I decided to tackle the issue, and I even ordered the TP-Link gear currently recommended by Wirecutter, but I sent it back when it didn’t improve anything.

Getting desperate, I even thought about doing a wireless point-to-point connection like I did for the barn, but it seemed overkill for such a short distance.

It was then I noticed that there was a coax cable connection in the other building. Hrm.

Our house was built in 2003, and while that (just) predated running things like Cat6 throughout the house, we do have coax for television. We don’t use it since we just stream everything, so I decided to see if I could use that cable for an Ethernet connection.

I learned that there is a standard called the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) that should do the trick. I then did some research before deciding on a pair of ScreenBeam Bonded MoCA 2.5 adapters.

I also bought a coax cable continuity tester to ensure that I had found the right cable. One cool thing about our house is that there is a nice utility closet where the air handlers for the HVAC live, as does the water heater and the demarc for the fiber internet connection. All of the coax connections come into this room so it was easy to tone out the right cable and attach the adapters.

Man, what a difference it makes.

I am constantly amazed at how well modern wireless technology works, but sometimes nothing beats a good ol’ wire.

[NOTE] If you order XT8 units today you will probably get version 2 of the hardware, and v2 is not supported by gnuton at the moment.