MoCA 2.0 Gateway Boxes Due in Late 2011, Entropic Says

The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) 2.0 certification test will be completed in the next few months with goal of having the first gateway boxes available by late 2011, Francisco Toro, technical lead engineer at Entropic, told us.

Having MoCA 2.0 gateway boxes installed will be important, since they will be key to handling data transfer speeds up to 400 Mbps provided for in the spec, said Toro, whose company is a major supplier of MoCA ICs to Verizon and others. The MoCA 2.0 spec, originally to be set by mid-2009, was completed in June. Other products installed along a MoCA network could be based on the 1.1 spec, which has a 175 Mbps maximum data rate, since they aren’t responsible for delivering content to the home network, he said. “The entry point to the home is where you want to have a lot of capacity,” Toro said. “You have a lot of content entering the home from that point, which you need to seed with high-capacity through-put boxes. From there, the gateway devices can feed MoCA 1.1-based products."

MoCA 2.0 includes channel bonding, which combines two lines into a single channel to double transfer speeds. It also enables the delivery of HD video to multiple rooms. Verizon’s FiOS service has MoCA 1.0 and 1.1 installed in more than 3 million set-top boxes, and DirecTV joined the fray this year with 1.1-equipped receivers. Comcast has expanded a MoCA test it has run in the Philadelphia area since 2008 to more than 20 markets including Charlotte, N.C., Portland, Ore., and Seattle, industry officials said. Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications and Cox Communications also have deployed MoCA 1.1 set-tops from Cisco, Motorola, Pace, Samsung and others, Toro said. Among those yet to launch MoCA set-tops is Dish Network, despite hardware supplier EchoStar’s having been a founder of the alliance. Industry officials speculate that’s because Dish relies on smaller installers, many yet to warm to MoCA.

In contrast, DirecTV moved installation inside the company by buying companies and has trained their employees in MoCA technology, industry officials said. “DirecTV is strategically looking at MoCA” as a way to sell its service. Besides starting to deploy MoCA-equipped receivers earlier this year, DirecTV is offering a DirecTV Ethernet-to-Coax (DECA) adapter, a bridge with an Ethernet port on one side and coax on the other that operates in the 500-850 MHZ frequencies. DECA adapters are used to both connect legacy DirecTV DVRs to satellite service’s whole-home network and to link Blu-ray players, TVs and other products to the Internet. MoCA networks also operate in the 850-1500 MHz frequencies for MSOs and Verizon’s FiOS, which have deployed ethernet-to-coax bridges (ECB) supplied by Actiontec, D-Link and others. ESBs can be deployed with any MSO, but DECA is available only with DirecTV.

Among the MoCA chip suppliers, Entropic has faced increased competition from Broadcom, which has shipped the BCM7410 and BCM7420 video decoder ICs, the latter integrated with a dual high-definition MoCA 1.1 modem. Entropic this year shipped the EN2510 IC, designed for MoCA 1.1. The EN2510 had a 166 MHz clock speed, an increase from 150 MHz found in the EN2210 MoCA 1.0-compliant chip.