MoCA 2.0 set to jolt home network

This week may prove to be one of the busier times in recent memory in the home network technology community: Just a day after the ITU announced formal approval of the G.hn standard, the Multimedia over Coax Alliance made good on recent rumors by announcing ratification of its own next-generation spec, MoCA 2.0.

Applications such as HD video and whole-home DVR are making home networking technologists push the envelope for greater speeds and enhanced features. “Operators do well at anticipating bandwidth they will need, but whatever they say they need, it always turns out to be more,” said Rob Gelphman, chairman of MoCA’s marketing work group.

With that in mind, MoCA 2.0 yields two performance modes, Basic and Enhanced, with speeds much higher than the current MoCA 1.1 spec’s throughput of 175 Mb/s. MoCA 2.0 enables 400 Mb/s and 800 Mb/s MAC speeds, with 700 Mb/s and 1.4 Gb/s PHY rates, respectively.

Gelphman said the new specification also expands the operating frequency range from 500 MHz to 1650 MHz to broaden potential use cases and support channel-bonding to increase speeds. Operating channel bandwidth has been doubled from 50 MHz to 100 MHz. The spec also provides for low-power sleep and stand-by modes and an improved packet error rate of one packet error per 100 million.

Perhaps most significantly for companies that have deployed earlier versions of MoCA, including Verizon, DirecTV and several cable TV operators, the 2.0 spec if fully interoperable with MoCA 1.0 and MoCA 1.1, which is not the case with all home networking technologies. Gelphman said MoCA 2.0 also can coexist with various short-range wireless technologies that have been emerging recently to broaden the potential for home network applications.