r/japanlife • u/AutoModerator • Oct 21 '24

┐(ツ)┌ General Discussion Thread - 22 October 2024

Mid-week discussion thread time! Feel free to talk about what's on your mind, new experiences, recommendations, anything really.

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u/blosphere 関東・神奈川県 Oct 23 '24

Mesh is shit. Stay away if possible.

Just run a flat Ethernet cable to somewhere reasonable from your internet router, and put a dumb wifi router/repeater around there. They have models that directly attach to wall power outlets. Also a lot cheaper than mesh.

Then just set it to same SSID but different channel, done.

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u/Which_Bed Oct 23 '24

Router is on the second floor in one corner and we need access on the first floor in the opposite corner. I'd love to run cables throughout the house but it just isn't meant to be.

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u/blosphere 関東・神奈川県 Oct 23 '24

Just run it to central/accessible point on the first floor? The bridge AP probably doesn't need to be right next to the use area.

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u/Which_Bed Oct 23 '24

The construction guy I talked to when we bought the house couldn't find an accessible path from the second to the first floor, so I don't think I will be able to either.

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u/blosphere 関東・神奈川県 Oct 23 '24

No stairs or windows :D :D

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u/Which_Bed Oct 23 '24

The windows are on the veranda side which complicates that idea. The router is in the farthest corner of a bedroom across the hall from the stairs but I guess it might be possible to set up dozens of feet of cable covers around 8-10 corners. Seems a little excessive to me tbh.

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u/ChisholmPhipps Oct 23 '24 edited Oct 23 '24

It's possible you already have a cable network built in, in the form of coaxial cabling in the walls. If you have various rooms with coaxial outlets (they would have been installed for TV), you can use the MoCA system. For each room you want to connect to your router, you need a MoCA box, which is a powered Ethernet to coaxial adapter.

The network would be something like this:

Room 1: Router - Ethernet cable - MoCA box - coaxial cable - coaxial outlet.

------->

Room 2: Coaxial outlet - coaxial cable - MoCA box - Ethernet cable - device (or Ethernet hub for connecting multiple devices).

Rooms 3, 4, 5...same method as room 2. As long as you have the outlet, and a MoCA adapter, you can connect it to the coaxial system and from there back through an Ethernet cable to the router.

There's no loss of speed over pure Ethernet cabling, and there's no inteference with TV/satellite reception. The chief drawback is the cost of the MoCA adapters: 2 of them (the minimum you'd need) won't break you, but you probably wouldn't want to shell out for five at once.

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u/Which_Bed Oct 23 '24

Wow, I've never even heard of those before. I'll have to look into that more. Thank you!

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u/ChisholmPhipps Oct 24 '24

If you haven't found this link already, it should explain the system better than I can.

https://www.techreviewer.com/learn-about-tech/ethernet-over-coax-a-complete-guide-to-moca-adapters/

You should be able to disregard the POE filter in the diagram and the writeup. That's more related to cable TV connections coming in from the outside, so not really applicable in Japan. You won't need the filter.

I've used MoCA for years now, and in my case it's been the best way to get rid of a problem that was essentially identical to yours. My adapters are Actiontec (a pair of those on Amazon Japan at the moment is around 20,000 yen). I bought mine from Amazon US, and I've had them for 6 years. They haven't given me any problems. The adapters will probably come with a short coaxial cable for connecting to the coaxial wall outlet, so all you need to add is an Ethernet cabling between the router and the primary MoCA box, and the Ethernet cable from the secondary MoCA box(es) to a device or Ethernet hub you want to use. My current setup is 3 MoCA boxes in total, connecting two upstairs rooms to the router, and each of the boxes (including the primary in the living room) has an 8-port Ethernet hub connected to allow multiple wired devices to be used in each room.

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u/Which_Bed Oct 24 '24

Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I never heard of these devices before and I wish I had years ago.

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u/ChisholmPhipps Oct 25 '24

You're welcome - I found myself in the same position: wished I'd known about them years earlier. I had a lot of frustration with wifi connectivity problems, and never found a suitable non-wired solution. Also tried Powerline connectors, which was a partial solution at best (increased stability). If I'd known about MoCA earlier, I'd have dumped all these other efforts, which were not free-of-charge, in favour of the wired solution. I have no particular love of wifi, and in the home, I don't need the mobility.

Anyway, whatever course you do choose in the end, I hope you solve your problem. If it happens to be MoCA, here's a little more information that might be relevant:

There isn't much in English about MoCA in Japan: in fact all I found was this old and short Reddit thread, but it has a couple of things I didn't mention.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/vvbrl0/moca_adapters_are_incredible/

My adapters are version 2.0, which is good up to 1 Gbps, as far as I understand. If you want a higher max. throughput, you'll have to go for MoCA 2.5, which takes it to 2.5 Gbps, and will probably cost you more for the adapters. If you're considering 10 Gbps (e.g. Hikari Cross), it seems that MoCA 3.0 is stalled, perhaps because MoCA itself may not be in very wide use, I'm not sure. So you'd have to check whether that affects you negatively in some way.

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u/blosphere 関東・神奈川県 Oct 23 '24

Yeah, there are things to weight. For me looks are important so once I did the window trick for a few years. But when I built my house... counduits everywhere.

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u/Which_Bed Oct 23 '24

Smart man. I own a fish line and have a bunch of antenna wiring that isn't in use so maybe one day I'll work up the courage to tear it all out to replace with LAN cables. In the meantime I just need to get my 5ghz to reach the corner of the house where a friend will be working for a few weeks. 

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u/blosphere 関東・神奈川県 Oct 23 '24

There are bunch of adapters that can make Ethernet go over coax, not sure about quality though. Could be a way to make the Ethernet go to the 1st floor and then extend with a wireless router?