Goodbye, Wi-Fi: How to Add a Wired Network to Your Home Without Running Ethernet

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ZDNET Highlights

• Wi-Fi is convenient but often unreliable for work and streaming.
• MoCA adapters convert coax outlets into high-speed wired connections.
• It is cheaper to use existing coax than to run new Ethernet cabling.

Wireless Internet connections are convenient, but they are also extremely unreliable. Nothing proves that point more powerfully than a glitchy video conference call, especially if it involves an important business meeting.

The answer is to run a wired network connection to your home office. Wi-Fi is great for mobility, but a wired connection offers many advantages when it comes to working from home. It’s faster and more reliable with low latency, which is all that matters if you regularly share large files, participate in high-quality video meetings, or even (ahem) play games.

But setting up a full-time wired connection is easier said than done. Even if you own your own home, running 50 or 100 feet of Ethernet cable is a messy and expensive task. If you are living and working in a rented house or apartment, forget about drilling holes in walls and ceilings.

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Luckily, there’s a solution to this, as I discovered a few years ago when I moved into a loft-style condo. My router was in the living room, serving gigabit downloads. My office was at the other end of the house, where the Wi-Fi signal was extremely weak due to the brick walls. There were no Ethernet jacks anywhere in my house, but there were cable outlets in every room. This solved my bandwidth dilemma.

Those cable outlets were originally installed to make it convenient to connect television sets in every room. However, the coaxial cable connecting those outlets can also carry Internet signals thanks to a technology called MoCA (Multimedia on Cox AllianceThe latest revision of this technology, MoCA 2.5, supports speeds up to 2.5Gbps.

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I want to emphasize that fact. I didn’t have an Ethernet cable running from one room to the next, but I did have coaxial cable capable of carrying the same amount of bandwidth.

That cable wiring was more than 20 years old, but it could reliably carry a 1Gbps signal over distances of more than 100 feet. In a very old home with extremely old coax cable, you may face problems. However, if your cable is capable of carrying an HDTV signal, it is probably capable of carrying a modern network as well.

Of course, you can’t plug an Ethernet cable directly into a cable outlet. Using existing coaxial cable requires a MoCA adapter at each end of the connection. That adapter is a simple box with two connectors on the back – one for the coaxial cable, the other for the RJ45 Ethernet plug.

I was lucky because my Xfinity cable modem supports MoCA technology directly. As a result, I needed an adapter for my office PC. i chose Trendnet TMO-312C Ethernet over Coax MoCA 2.5 AdapterPictured above. After connecting the adapter to the cable outlet in my home office using a very short coaxial cable, I connected it to the Gigabit Ethernet port on my home office PC using a standard Cat 6 cable.

But if I had a fiber connection to the internet everything would work fine. It doesn’t matter how the Internet gets into your home or office because that entry point usually includes a router where you can plug in three or more RJ45 connectors.

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If your Internet comes through a cable modem, check if it supports MoCA directly. If it doesn’t, you’ll need a cable splitter and a second MoCA adapter to connect to the Ethernet port on the cable modem/gateway. If your Internet comes via fiber or another non-cable option, you can use a MoCA adapter to convert the cable outlet at that junction to an endpoint on your network.

If you have multiple cable outlets in your home or office, you can add a MoCA adapter to each, and you can plug any Ethernet-compatible device into that adapter—a PC, a Mac, or a smart TV, for example. You can also use this technology in conjunction with a Wi-Fi network to add a Wi-Fi access point in a basement, attic, or other location that is too far from the primary access point to receive a reliable signal.

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One last extra thing I recommend on any MoCA network is a POE (Point of Entry) filter. This small device screws into the cable at the point it enters the home – before it reaches the cable modem or any MoCA adapter. It prevents network signals from leaving your home network (helping to keep your communications secure) and improves performance by reflecting radio frequency signals above 1 GHz back into the home network. i used it Belden POE Filter For less than $10 from Amazon.

MoCA technology is a great alternative to standard Ethernet wiring, and it costs a fraction of what you’d have to pay to retrofit dedicated Ethernet cabling in your home. It’s a worthwhile option to consider when Wi-Fi can’t reach point A to point B.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in May 2022 and was last updated and fact-checked in December 2025.