MoCA picking up steam with telcos

The Multimedia Over Coax Alliance is quickly emerging as one of the preferred solutions for carriers trying to solve the issue of getting video over IP from the side of the house to set-top boxes.

MoCA, as it refers to itself, announced this week it would demonstrate a home digital entertainment network at the Digital Living Room 2005 event in San Mateo, Calif. The alliance--formed by Cisco Systems, Comcast, EchoStar, Entropic Communications, Motorola, Panasonic, Radio Shack and Toshiba--initially was of little interest to telcos, but that has changed recently, said Eric Buffkin, founder and president of consulting firm Pelagic Group and chairman of the MoCA marketing group.

“As we started pulling this together a year ago, there was not the momentum for the telcos to join,” he said. “I would not be surprised over the next several months if the telcos were to join or become involved in a large way.”

The group’s goal is to design a way for all service providers to use the vast amounts of bandwidth on in-home coax networks to transmit data and video in a secure way. For telcos, that thought is striking a chord. One of most perplexing issues for early telco TV deployments has been the issue of moving video from a termination device at the side of the home to an IP set-top box. Most IP set-tops are designed only to accept Ethernet connections via RJ-45 jacks, but many are beginning to include coax connections.

“We’re designing this thing as a generic home network,” Buffkin said. “We designed it fundamentally for two audiences and one of them is the service providers so they can design that multimedia network without a truck roll.”

From a practical standpoint, Buffkin expects MoCA to be adopted by optical network unit vendors.

“The first products out will adapters,” he said. “As you move along you’ll see people integrating this.”