Netgear, Entropic Ready To Go With MoCA 2.0

Entropic said its chip is powering the first MoCA 2.0-certified device to reach the market– a MoCA-to-WiFi extender made by Netgear.

Netgear’s device, called the WM2500RP and is outfitted with Entropic’s EN2710 MoCA 2.0 chip and 802.11n Wi-Fi, is designed to improve whole-home video and data coverage by taking advantage of the faster throughputs enabled by the new coax-based home networking platform.

A step above 1.1, the new product, which Netgear is making available to service providers, supports usable throughputs of more than 400 Mbps in “Basic mode and 500 Mbps in a “Turbo” point-to-point setting when connected devices are operating in the baseline mode and utilizing a single channel. MoCA 2.0 also supports an “Enhanced” mode that uses channel bonding to produce throughputs of between 800 Mbps to 1 Gbps.  

Entropic said the throughputs enabled by MoCA 2.0 provide enough headroom to distribute bandwidth-hungry apps on the home network, including 4K/Ultra HD content.

Entropic and rival Broadcom have developd MoCA-approved 2.0 “Golden Nodes” for interoperability testing. In January, the Multimedia over Coax Alliance said its certification program for products implementing the 2.0 version of MoCA had become available to all members.

MoCA 2.0 was ratified by the Alliance in mid-2010. Here’s a current list of MoCA-certified products.