MoCA pushes home networking to over 1 Gbit/sec

Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(06/16/10, 8:15 AM GMT)

San Jose, Ca. - The Multimedia over Coax Alliance has released a ratified version (2.0) of its specification for home networking over coax cables that when fully revved up will exceed a Gbit/second.

Itc supports a baseline data rate up to 400 MHz and can more than double that using a combination of new channel-bonding and point-to-point capabilities, enabling it go compete with other home networking technologies as Wi-Fi, powerline and the emerging ITU G.hn standard.

MoCA 2.0 has a baseline of MAC-layer throughput up to 400 Mbits/s on an 100 MHz channel. A new channel bonding feature will let users get twice that for some applications.

A turbo mode promises a 25 percent throughput boost for point-to-point links. That means 500 Mbits/s for the baseline rate or more than a Gbit/s for the enhanced mode using channel bonding.

The 2.0 spec includes new sleep and standby modes to save power. It includes a feature similar to Wake on LAN used on the Internet and Ethernet.

Its operating frequencies have been expanded from about 1100 MHz up to 1650 MHz with the new spec, to create a second channel for the channel-bonding enhanced mode.

To meet the need of some network providers, the new spec also supports a mode that can lower error rates from one in a million on the previous version of the spec down to one in 100 million.

It also supports a new way to make bandwidth reservation requests to help maintain low latency of about 3.5 to 5 milliseconds on average, even when a network is fully loaded with the 16 nodes maximum that MoCA supports.

The new spec is backward compatible with MoCA 1.1. Proponents claim the new spec will outperform G.hn implementations which have yet to hit the market.

To learn more, go to www.moca.org.  

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