LAN & WAN Reviews

Inside View

Figure 3 is a picture of the MCA1001's board. The RF section is under the shield and I didn't muck with it. But there is probably an Entropic EN1010 RF Interace chip under there somewhere. You can clearly see the Entropic EN2210-BG2 c.Link Coaxial Network Controller that does the MoCA 1.1 heavy lifting.

Figure 3: MCA1001 board

The other two devices of interest are the Micrel KSZ8041NL 10/100 Ethernet PHY and Atmel ATMEGA168 AVR Microcontroller with 16 KB Flash, 1 KB RAM and 512 B EEPROM.

Administration

As I noted above, there are not a lot of knobs to twiddle on the MCA1001. Figure 4 shows the Coax screen, which is the only place where you can affect performance. The default settings are shown. The Diplexer Mode setting warns that using the All Pass setting (the only other one available) will block all signals from the Coax Out.

Figure 4: Admin - Coax screen

The user manual says the Channel setting can be used if "TV quality is reduced" by the adatper's installation. Figure 5 elaborates on the Channel selector options.

Figure 5: Channel setting explanation

Figure 6 is the Privacy screen, where you can enter a numerical encryption key. You need to enter the same key on all MCAs that you want to communicate privately.

Figure 6: Admin - Privacy screen

Figure 7 shows the Statistics screen, which as I explained earlier is not real-time information. Good luck troubleshooting any intermittent problems with it!

Figure 7: Admin - Statistics screen

Figure 8 provides a snapshot of the MoCA devices seen by the adapter. You only get the transmit and receive rates for the adapter you are plugged into. Again, not very handy for troubleshooting.

Figure 8: Admin - MoCA Devices screen