MoCA completes Plugfest

SAN DIEGO--The Multimedia over Coax Alliance announced it has finished the first round of interoperability testing among eight different vendors during its first ever “Plugfest.”

MoCA, an alliance of vendors and carriers promoting the use of in-home coax to run multimedia over IP, is aiming at having a process by which equipment is certified and given a logo. At the Plugfest, the eight vendors--Actiontec Electronics, Entropic Communications, Linksys, Motorola, Mototech, Panasonic, 2Wire and Westell Technologies--set up an eight-node MoCA network. Over that network, the company shared three high-definition video streams, eight standard-definition video streams and interactive gaming.

“Each one had a MOCA device, and they were all connected through a typical coax network,” said Ladd Wardani, president of MoCA. “All the HDs were running at full speed, so this was about 20 Mb/s.”

Among the implementations of MoCA being used during the tests were residential gateways, Ethernet/coax bridges, reference designs, and chipsets. Wardani said the group has just finalized a full certification and test plan. The first certification wave is expected to begin in mid-December.

“The plugfest was a subset of those tests, more like a test run for those companies,” he said.