As last mile bandwidth continues to increase, it will be increasingly important for operators to ensure that the home network isn’t a bottleneck. When and where bottlenecks occur will depend on the home network and the types and numbers of applications and devices consumers use. In the above interview, Rob Gelphman, Vice President of Marketing and Member Relations of MoCA, argues that a wired backbone is critical to supporting the bandwidths that consumers are already beginning to demand.

According to the recently MoCA-commissioned, Parks Associates‘ survey, consumers are receptive to the idea of using existing household wires (whether coaxial cable, electrical wire or Ethernet cable) as a method for  resolving networking issues. According to Parks Associates (PDF), “Over 50% of respondents would be comfortable using wired solutions to resolve networking problems.” And 40% of the households Parks Associates surveyed have experienced wireless networking issues within their home network.

Gelphman points out that both reliability and performance are important when using existing wires to build a home network. MoCA has been looking at real-world performance and reliability for some time, as their first real-world testing of the MoCA 1.1 technology (PDF) was a decade ago. MoCA’s most recent study of the performance and reliability of MoCA 2.0 tested the technology in 200 randomly selected homes throughout the United States. The results of the testing were that 90% of the paths had throughputs of at least 400 Mb/s.  In a follow-up email, Gelphman explained that the upstream/downstream ratio of this bandwidth is dynamic.

“The 400 Mbps throughput is aggregate, up/down combined.  The ratio is dynamic depending on actual user traffic.  So it could be all up, all down, or anything in between.

With these kind of results, it is clear that MoCA will continue to be a tool in operators’ toolbox to help them rapidly creat, must-have, high-bandwidth home networks.