Wi-Fi over Coax for better signal strength

[quadwan]

Has anyone seen the Kickstarter project that puts a Wi-Fi splitter on a home's coaxial cabling, and puts Wi-Fi antennas on unused cable outlets? Curious if this has been tried out by anyone yet. It's basically a distributed antenna system so it sounds like it might work out better for ping times and overall coverage than a mesh.

kickstarter.com/projects/1577631618/coaxifi-whole-home-wi-fi-over-coax

 

[hyelton]

Has anyone seen the Kickstarter project that puts a Wi-Fi splitter on a home's coaxial cabling, and puts Wi-Fi antennas on unused cable outlets? Curious if this has been tried out by anyone yet. It's basically a distributed antenna system so it sounds like it might work out better for ping times and overall coverage than a mesh.

kickstarter.com/projects/1577631618/coaxifi-whole-home-wi-fi-over-coax

Looks like something a lot of Cable plants are going to hate lol. If you mean unused cable outlets do you mean that you no longer have cable tv or cable internet and making sure of the outlets? Then yes it might could work. But if you still have cable tv or cable internet no it would not work and your cable co will probably cut you off for generating ingress.


A mesh network would still be better as even if it did work it would result in reduced performance as you'd want all 3 antennas next to each other if it was a 3x3 you'd want them all next to each other.

Only real advantage of this was if you wanted your router in one room and your antenna outside or in a central part of the home, which that can already be done easily by using a SMA cable/connector.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[quadwan]

Looks like something a lot of Cable plants are going to hate lol. If you mean unused cable outlets do you mean that you no longer have cable tv or cable internet and making sure of the outlets? Then yes it might could work. But if you still have cable tv or cable internet no it would not work and your cable co will probably cut you off for generating ingress.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

What they're saying is that the kit includes one pair of diplexers to separate the higher frequencies from the lower frequencies QAM/DOCSIS. The video claims there's no FEC errors when the diplexer's in use, so no RF ingress. The particular kits they're selling would be good for having the Wi-Fi signals coexist with one cable modem, or one TV antenna, or one MoCA adapter pair. Otherwise I'm sure that without the diplexers you'd need to keep the cable modem off the home's cabling runs. Yeah, they mentioned this being geared to cord cutters that still have a cable modem.

 

[System Error Message]

antenna design is specific to the frequencies used. You want better reception of some frequencies and worse on others. So using those copper cables as an antenna sure is an efficient way to do things but is a terrible practice as you can expect low bandwidths instead.

You wont see errors as the encoding is designed to tolerate problems and like any network transmission media, errors simply reduce the bitrate to a rate where the errors dont occur.

However to plant an antenna onto a cable, using the cable as an extension its basically the same deal as signal loss is significant over greater distances, its basically like using antenna extension cables.

 

[CaptainSTX]

antenna design is specific to the frequencies used. You want better reception of some frequencies and worse on others. So using those copper cables as an antenna sure is an efficient way to do things but is a terrible practice as you can expect low bandwidths instead.

You wont see errors as the encoding is designed to tolerate problems and like any network transmission media, errors simply reduce the bitrate to a rate where the errors dont occur.

However to plant an antenna onto a cable, using the cable as an extension its basically the same deal as signal loss is significant over greater distances, its basically like using antenna extension cables.

The way I understand CATV works using coaxial cable is that it transmits the RF on the surface of the inner wire. Would this device really be using the coaxial as an antenna extension cable or a medium on which to transport the WiFi's radio signal using the inner cable?

 

[quadwan]

The way I understand CATV works using coaxial cable is that it transmits the RF on the surface of the inner wire. Would this device really be using the coaxial as an antenna extension cable or a medium on which to transport the WiFi's radio signal using the inner cable?

It sounds like that's what it does, using the center conductor of an house's RG6 cable to carry the Wi-Fi signal and then using the aluminum shielding around the conductor to block interference.

Incidentally, I had some spare SMA and F connectors for crimping and tried to duplicate what they're doing on a single cable, using my R7000 router. The method seems to work pretty well, connecting one of the R7000's stock dual-band antennas to a coaxial wallplate (with a droopy-looking makeshift jumper cable). I have 100 Mbps symmetrical over fiber, and am getting the same bandwidth over Wi-Fi. Acrylic is showing an RSSI of about -40 to -44 dBm on 5.8 GHz at about 50 feet from the router, versus -25 dBm right at the router. Which is better than I was expecting for RG6 because the attenuation at 50 feet should be at least 7 dB.

 

[System Error Message]

well the concept does work, only that you might end up with timing issues but for low bandwidth wifi thats not an issue.

It still is an efficient way to cover a house, 1 wifi router, less electricity use and it is less costly but it requires the house to have cable infrastructure already in.

 

[sfx2000]

Has anyone seen the Kickstarter project that puts a Wi-Fi splitter on a home's coaxial cabling, and puts Wi-Fi antennas on unused cable outlets? Curious if this has been tried out by anyone yet. It's basically a distributed antenna system so it sounds like it might work out better for ping times and overall coverage than a mesh.

The RF engineer and old-school HAM that I sometimes consider myself to be - erm... nope.

Most old-school cable plants inside the home have a sharp cut-off - analog is below 1GHz, newer stuff might run up to 1.7GHz for DOCSIS3 and MOCA..

And then the variable antenna match across runs - nope again...

 

[System Error Message]

The RF engineer and old-school HAM that I sometimes consider myself to be - erm... nope.

Most old-school cable plants inside the home have a sharp cut-off - analog is below 1GHz, newer stuff might run up to 1.7GHz for DOCSIS3 and MOCA..

And then the variable antenna match across runs - nope again...

You could always try to reproduce what they do, and if it is a fraud you'd at least have the proof to report them.

 

[sfx2000]

You could always try to reproduce what they do, and if it is a fraud you'd at least have the proof to report them.

I don't have to - if it was that easy, someone would have done this a long time ago... trust me here, I know what I'm talking about.

There are antenna's that radiate using "leaky feeder", but this is carefully matched to the AP radio as an engineered solution... and this is very specially designed cable - one finds this many times in industrial wifi solutions...

DAS is also a thing - we used to use this all the time in 3G/4G/LTE, but again, it's an engineered solution for that site.

 

[System Error Message]

i get what you mean by special cables to block out other frequencies as well.

However the main question to the concept is simply if you had a piece of copper between the antenna and radio, would it still work? I understand that coax is not ideal for the wifi frequencies but what if you reduced the wifi rate to the slowest? For wifi AC this would be around 50Mb/s.

 

[sfx2000]

However the main question to the concept is simply if you had a piece of copper between the antenna and radio, would it still work? I understand that coax is not ideal for the wifi frequencies but what if you reduced the wifi rate to the slowest? For wifi AC this would be around 50Mb/s.

I'm not saying Coax is bad - heck, look at most router internal shots - that's coax from the FEM to the Antenna...

But that value is matched, with a cable that works properly with 2.4GHz and 5GHz...

Running WiFi over a household CATV RG-58/RG-6 - that plant is not meant for those frequencies - and it's a bad match at that, 75 ohm vs. 50 ohm impendance, and the cut-off for acceptable performance in a cable system is matched to the receivers - With cable companies - RG6 is good up to around 1.7GHz to get decent performance for DOCSIS3/MOCA... and have an acceptable level of bandwidth to support HDTV and good MOCA bandwidth.

When looking at older RG-58 systems, this is primarily for Analog (PAL/NTSC), and some of that wiring can be extremely old, pre-Digital, so performance there above 1GHz was never a consideration...

Anyways - lots of nifty ideas on Kickstarter, not all of them are based on physics and/or sound engineering...

I wish them luck...

 

[CaptainSTX]

I'm not saying Coax is bad - heck, look at most router internal shots - that's coax from the FEM to the Antenna...

But that value is matched, with a cable that works properly with 2.4GHz and 5GHz...

Running WiFi over a household CATV RG-58/RG-6 - that plant is not meant for those frequencies - and it's a bad match at that, 75 ohm vs. 50 ohm impendance, and the cut-off for acceptable performance in a cable system is matched to the receivers - With cable companies - RG6 is good up to around 1.7GHz to get decent performance for DOCSIS3/MOCA... and have an acceptable level of bandwidth to support HDTV and good MOCA bandwidth.

When looking at older RG-58 systems, this is primarily for Analog (PAL/NTSC), and some of that wiring can be extremely old, pre-Digital, so performance there above 1GHz was never a consideration...

Anyways - lots of nifty ideas on Kickstarter, not all of them are based on physics and/or sound engineering...

I wish them luck...

I Agree with most of what you say, but as a point of clarification most inside wiring for the past ten years has been RG-6 and prior to that it was RG-59.

 

[sfx2000]

RG-59

hehe - nice catch - typo and then confirmed with the auto-correct

 

[VisionxOrb]

I would imagine that there special splitter is some type of impedance matching circuit so that it at-least presents a good match at the router end, even if the type of coax isn't ideal at these frequencies.

 

[quadwan]

Re: "someone would have done this a long time ago" - apparently this sort of thing is already used in China (w-wlan.com). I tried something similar over a single RG6 run and am surprised there aren't more products out there for this. Would be neat to see a head to head comparison of their product versus Orbi, Velop and the others.

Looking at http://www.net-comber.com/cable-loss.html which doesn't sweep-test all the way to 5.8 GHz, it looks like RG59 is a bit worse in attenuation than RG6, but still serviceable. RG11 (like cablecos tend to use from the tap) is even better than RG6. Obviously there's a wire inside every Wi-Fi antenna as well, but I'm not sure if that's RG142 or something thinner and less shielded.

 

[sfx2000]

Re: "someone would have done this a long time ago" - apparently this sort of thing is already used in China (w-wlan.com).

And if it were successful - MSO's and Telco's would have been all over this...

Which isn't happening...

But, hey, it's china, and lot's of money floating around out there - so throw some stuff at the wall, and see what sticks... even then, find an investor in China, rather than a kickstarter...

Heck, if it were that easy, Huawei and ZTE would be pushing this very hard...

 

[System Error Message]

And if it were successful - MSO's and Telco's would have been all over this...

Which isn't happening...

But, hey, it's china, and lot's of money floating around out there - so throw some stuff at the wall, and see what sticks... even then, find an investor in China, rather than a kickstarter...

Heck, if it were that easy, Huawei and ZTE would be pushing this very hard...

they arent pushing this because its not in their scope, laying cables in buildings. Its why cars dont come with PCs (as in personal computer, not the computer used to manage the car). Also RF engineers like to get the best performance/quality so they dont do this sort of stuff.

 

[quadwan]

And if it were successful - MSO's and Telco's would have been all over this...

Which isn't happening...

But, hey, it's china, and lot's of money floating around out there - so throw some stuff at the wall, and see what sticks... even then, find an investor in China, rather than a kickstarter...

Heck, if it were that easy, Huawei and ZTE would be pushing this very hard...

There's always going to be more money in selling new junk than keeping old gear working longer. Just look at Apple, or closer to home, buying a Wave 2 router only to see it replaced by 802.11ax. I guess the analogy to draw would be all those vintage American cars in Cuba that they've kept running for 58 years

 

[Samir]

I just found out about this product. Seems like the product is really inexpensive and doesn't sound like it would work in theory. But has anyone had any personal experience with it?