Review on Comtrend Enhanced Streaming and Gaming G.hn Powerline Ethernet 💻 Over Coaxial Kit - 1200Mbps Speed - 2 Unit Kit (GCA-6000KIT) by Tim Aguilar

I recently wired the network infrastructure on the first floor of our house using Cat 5E to Gigabit Ethernet Cable that terminates at the network utility router. Panel in our basement. I did this to replace a network of 4 MOCA 1.0 Motorola NIM100's that I have used for the last 15 years. But recent complaints from kids about "slow" network speeds when streaming or gaming meant it was time to upgrade the wired and Wi-Fi infrastructure along with my internet connection (FiOS 75/75). The house has an outbuilding with two foundations separated by stairs so I can't drill and align in that area. It was almost a deal breaker as the add-on has both a kid's lounge and an upstairs family room where a lot of online activities take place (Xbox, Switch, PCs, Wi-Fi routers, video streaming, etc.). Needing good bandwidth and being constrained by my existing RG-6 coax cable, I was planning to buy a bundle of MOCA 2.0 bundle adapters, but the price put me off a bit. When the extension was built, they ran two (RG-6) coaxial lines from the service console on the other side of the foundation to the audio/video center in the common room. I never understood why they did this and while we only needed one feed the other was obscure for the 20 years we lived here. While browsing other options I accidentally came across these units. I decided to try them out as I had a dark coax line that would isolate them from the rest of my FiOS TV signal. This point is very important - you cannot use them over a coaxial cable that carries existing cable TV signals. In my case, the dark RG-6 coax is probably around 10-15 feet or so, so I felt confident that I could get the most bandwidth out of these devices, especially based on other comments here that reported excellent speeds with heavy usage notice greater length. Like MOCA (and WiFi), these devices are half-duplex. This means that all bandwidth is available to both devices on the connection, but only one device can transmit at a time. MOCA 2.0 achieves a maximum speed of 400 Mbps or almost 500 Mbps if you only use two adapters (Turbo mode in which the protocol overhead is greatly reduced and can be used for additional data transmission, but once you add a third adapter, you it be the back). up to 400 Mbps (maximum throughput). To achieve "1Gbps” speed, the connected MOCA uses two channels to aggregate data, effectively doubling the speed. However, this also increases latency, as the data on these independent links must be queued and properly reordered before exiting the Ethernet port. So with the combined MOCA 2.0 you get more speed, but at the expense of latency (very important for gaming and streaming) and at a higher price. This is by no means insufficient, there are only compromises. On the other hand, the GCA-6000 use a single channel at 1200Mbps. This significantly reduces latency. (MOCA also uses connections at twice the "effective" data rate.) As with MOCA, more than two devices can be used to create an interconnected "mesh network". (Setup is easy, they connect and work, or you can assign and manage IP addresses if you prefer, but that's not really necessary.) Comtrend claims a maximum throughput of 600Mbps. I used a free app called LANbench to test the effective speeds I could get from these devices over my 1Gbps backbone. All measurements in the attached screenshots were taken with my office PC, which then connects to my main router (Netgear R6220) using the GCA-6000 via this short RG-6 cable to a Netgear 8-port switch in the living room and then plugs directly into a 4-port Netgear switch in the break room where the kid's game computer is located. During testing, I took screenshots to show both current and actual speeds. In unidirectional mode (TX or RX only) I consistently get an "average" throughput of just over 650Mbps, with peak speeds of around 30-40Mbps higher. (In one case I had a peak speed of over 700 Mbps.) At full duplex you can see the speeds are about half that, but overall they are almost half duplex speeds. That's fast enough for the way we use it, and I recently upgraded my internet to FiOS 200/200 (which is measuring 300/300 all the time!). These devices use an early version of G.hn, but there will be devices on the market soon that will offer a full throughput of 1 Gbit/s (or more). I probably won't upgrade as current devices have all the speed we need. Bottom line, it didn't make sense for me to pay nearly 2x more for MOCA 2.0, which has higher latency and only delivers 250Mbps. almost never use it. I don't regularly transfer TB of files over my network and don't use full capacity in full duplex mode. Bonded MOCA 2.0 adapters are still a great option for those who don't have dark or insulated coax, and I would do it myself if I didn't have dark coax available. But if they suit you, just get them and save some money.