MoCA Brewing Up Bigger Bandwidth
CTO Anton Monk Outlines Plans for MoCA 2.0 Home-Networking Specification
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 12/15/2008 7:01:00 PM
Need more oomph on your home network? The Multimedia over Coax Alliance is aiming to kick home networks up past 400 Megabits per second with the second major iteration of its spec, which is targeted for completion in 2009.
“We’ve never stated that MoCA is the be-all and end-all,” said Anton Monk, chief technology officer of MoCA as well as Entropic Communications’ co-founder and vice president of technology. “But if you have coax, it’s the highest-capacity network you have in the home.”
The first version of MoCA delivered 100 Mbps of net throughput, and version 1.1 upped that to 175 Mbps. Today, according to Monk, well more than 10 million MoCA nodes are deployed and operational in the field.
And MoCA has notched another feather in its cap: The Digital Living Network Alliance recently added MoCA as an official network interface for the DLNA digital-media sharing specification. MoCA members include Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Verizon Communications, DirecTV, Motorola, Cisco Systems, EchoStar, Broadcom and Entropic.
Monk spoke this week with Multichannel News technology editor Todd Spangler. 
Multichannel News: What’s the significance of the inclusion of MoCA in the DLNA interoperability guidelines?
Anton Monk: For the past year and half, MoCA members have been working within DLNA to submit MoCA as an additional phy [physical layer] -- until now it’s just been Ethernet and Wi-Fi. So now it will be Wi-Fi, Ethernet and MoCA. To us, that’s obviously a natural fit for a technology that was designed to move multimedia within the home.
MCN: What’s happening with MoCA’s 2.0 specification?
AM: We’ve spent a lot of time -- driven by the service providers, the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and the silicon vendors -- to come together with market-driven requirements.
It’s a significant expansion of the bandwidth: MoCA 2.0 is targeting greater than 400 Mbps of baseline net throughput.
The spec will be ratified in 2009, and you’ll see product in 2010. It’s really service providers that are going to drive these technologies. It’s important that the service providers know that they’re going to get it, in a very high percentage of the outlets. With MoCA 1.0, we’ve always stressed coverage of more than 97% of outlets.
MCN: Would the number of outlets covered be less with 2.0?
AM: Yeah, it would be less, but not a whole lot less. We can predict what MoCA 2.0 will do, based on our coverage of 1.0. The reason we get such high coverage is because of the way the physical layer and the MAC [media access control] layer are designed -- you’re optimizing to the coax medium.
MCN: Why would home networks need to operate at more than 400 Mbps?
AM: The U.S. service providers are designing for large homes, the 95th percentile of homes. If you’re talking about distributing high-definition video, with high-speed trick modes, being able to scale to eight to 10 rooms, then you need a lot of bandwidth.
The most obvious one for really high data rates is Verizon. They can easily get a gigabit per second to the home [with FiOS], and they want that to be fairly future-proofed. If you bring a gigabit per second to the side of the house, you want to be able to bring that into the house.
MCN: Does MoCA have the runway to get to 1 Gbps?
AM: Certainly there is that possibility with MoCA, because it operates in the range above 1 GHz. You can’t go too high above 2 GHz because your outlet coverage starts dropping significantly.
But in terms of scalability it’s not a complexity issue. Much like DOCSIS 3.0 was able to expand their baseline throughput by channel bonding, that’s something that could be done with MoCA 2.0. Channel bonding is going to be discussed as part of 2.0.
MCN: One of the key applications for MoCA is multiroom DVR. Why haven’t we seen cable companies introduce this feature? Verizon launched that two years ago using MoCA.
AM: You’re asking a marketing question, not a technology question. It goes to the philosophy of the cable companies. They’re moving at different speeds. They’re not a greenfield like Verizon is -- and Verizon has had to stake a claim and take market share.
You’ll see all of them do this, but it’s different for each provider. For some, it’s protecting their turf. For others it’s generating revenue. The providers are still figuring out what services they can layer on top of this high-speed networking backbone in the home. Eventually I think [multiroom DVR] will be a de facto requirement from the public.
MCN: What else is next for MoCA?
AM: There will be retail products based on [version] 1.1. Expect retail products to be announced at CES.
MCN: What kind of retail products?
AM: At the most basic level, it’s MoCA-to-Ethernet bridges. You can give your Xbox 360 an extremely high-speed link to the outside world. You don’t have to worry about your Wi-Fi coverage -- with MoCA it’s a 100-Mbps connection to my cable modem. …
There’s also just been an explosion of over-the-top services. This is probably something the service providers are not enamored with but whether they like it or not it’s going to be there. This completely removes the bottleneck in the home.
MCN: Will MoCA be embedded into cable modems?
AM: Yes. I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you it’s happening. You’re going to see the gateway model propagate throughout the industry. At that point, MoCA just looks like another port. Ideally the user doesn’t even know there’s a home network in there. The set-top boxes have MoCA in them. Scientific Atlanta/Cisco, Motorola, Panasonic, Samsung, Pace -- they all have MoCA versions of their set-tops.
