# Moca Install on Fios



## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

I am getting Verizon Fios TV installed next week and I got a couple of questions that I'm hoping someone can help me answer before the installer gets here. By the way, I currently have Fios Internet but no TV. I have Directv but canceling to get Fios and TiVo premiere along with that.


I bought 2 Premiere boxes and I already got them but they are still in the box as I'm not sure if I can power them up before they install Fios including cable cards next week. Can I?
According to my attached diagram I think the wiring should be done that way to insure the Moca works properly. Is that correct? 
Do I still need attenuators? I read somewhere that I wouldn't need them using the new TiVo Premiere but I'm not sure.
Should I install a POE (see diagram) to improve MoCA performance on my network and if so is that the correct location?
Based on my living room setup, where should my TiVo Unit #1 be connected to via ethernet, the Actiontec router or my Airport Extreme? Keep in mind that my A.E. is used in bridge mode only and is the one that has Wireless connection enabled as this is turned off on my Actiontec one.
Since I already have plenty of coaxial wirings that I was using for my Directv receivers I was planning on using those coaxial connections to run lines directly from the splitter to the Tivo Unit #2 box instead of using the out line on the Moca Adapter. I read somewhere that by bypassing the adapter, my connection to the Tivo would be stronger and therefore clearer. Is that correct?

Your answer(s) to any or all of these questions is greatly appreciated!


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## turbobozz (Sep 21, 2006)

Absolutely power them up and do guided setup ahead of time... just tell your tivos to skip cablecard setup part.

If you don't find enough info here, you can check the dslreports forums for info on setting up fios 424 w/ moca for non fios devices.
(I've seen that info there before, but I don't use moca so I can't say if its right or not.)


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## strejcek (Mar 15, 2006)

I made the switch to FIOS in March and have never regretted a single minute of it. You will not need a filter of any kind and the way your diagram is set up is pretty much the way my setup is. The FIOS tech will provide all necessary splitters and will split the FIOS signal; one to the ONT, the other to your RG6. You will not need any attenuators, the FIOS signal has been toned down and is now TiVo friendly. So long as your TiVo is able to make it out to the net and remain on the same subnet as your other TiVo (for multi-room viewing) it really does not matter which router or bridge you plug it into. I have both of mine hooked up to two wireless bridges and they work great. As far as Moca adapters go, I don't have any so I can't answer that, but if I did, I would probably be using them for my network connections. You'll really enjoy FIOS, especially in the rain


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## sabre70 (Mar 28, 2010)

I too have Fios and really like it. Alex, just make sure your install tech tests all of your coax lines that are already in your home if you are planning on using them for moca. I initially had the Fios Moto boxes before switching, but the tech I had left one run of older coax and I had nothing but issues with streaming between moto boxes. The tivo actually transferes rather than streams but none the less you will still want them to test the moca rates on your lines to be sure you are good to go. Hope you enjoy the tivo/fios.


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## rage777 (Aug 19, 2006)

FYI, you do need the CAT5 from the living room router to the Tivo. You don't need it from the Airport.


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## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

Thank you all for your replies regarding my post. Installer should be here 10/06 and I will post my results here in case that someone else has the same questions later on.

Meanwhile, a few questions that came up from the last replies:



sabre70 said:


> Alex, just make sure your install tech tests all of your coax lines that are already in your home if you are planning on using them for moca. I initially had the Fios Moto boxes before switching, but the tech I had left one run of older coax and I had nothing but issues with streaming between moto boxes. The tivo actually transferes rather than streams but none the less you will still want them to test the moca rates on your lines to be sure you are good to go.


Isn't coax simply coax? I thought it was but what kind of deficiencies could be there for the Moca not to work properly? Also, since I already have Fios Internet I wonder if the installer that's coming to my house will be saavy enough to deal with internet hook-ups also, or he will simply deal with TV connections period?

Also:


rage777 said:


> FYI, you do need the CAT5 from the living room router to the Tivo. You don't need it from the Airport.


Does it really have to be connected to the Actiontec router? I ask because I would prefer for the Airport to handle the traffic as I've heard that the Actiontec one sometimes has issues doing so... That being said, I can see that the Actiontec router already has to handle the 2nd TiVo box as the connection is being patch through from the MoCa connection. I'm not a network expert but I try to fend myself making a few connections here and there. Nevertheless, I wonder what is the impact of a different router (in this case the A.E.) handling the traffic of 1 TiVo box through one connection node and the other router (Actiontec) handling the traffic of the other TiVo box, is that a big "no no" even though the A.E. is only acting in "bridge mode"?

Finally, has anyone using Moca had the need to use the POE filters? From what I've read this suppose to bounce back to the router any "leaked" signals from other network devices. In other words, stop those signals before they reach the ONT and reflect them back to the router. Maybe is overkill and I don't really need it but I figure I ask before I start wondering what's wrong with the connection.

Looking forward to no more rain black outs as this was starting to become more prevalent with my Directv and the obvious advantage of having a TiVo box instead of a "no-good" Directv DVR.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

You should run a piece of cat5e or cat6 cable from where the ONT is to where the router will be. Then maybe you can be provisionioned for Ethernet instead of coax.

That is the most versatile. if your Actiontec has issues, with MoCA, you will will be stuck waiting for a replacement with no internet access. If provisioned for ethernet you can always connect you own router to teh ONT, or use you own router all the time, which is how my setup is right now.

You can aslo use your own router and use the Actiontec has a MoCA bridge too. Which I had considered doing but instead just orderda couple of Dlink MoCA adapters to use from point A to point B on a piece of coax.


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## rage777 (Aug 19, 2006)

I guess you could use the Airlink instead of the Actiontec, but I haven't had any problems with my Actiontec. I have four Actiontec routers, with three of them in bridge mode and it works great.

I don't use any filters anywhere.

The installer will probably test all the coax lines to make sure the signal is strong enough for Fios. The problem is you might have a splitter that isn't 1GHz and uses the older 800 MHz rating.


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## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

I am going to give Moca a try as I have already invested in buying the Actiontec Moca adapter. I think Moca sounds pretty efficient and not to mention fast.

As far as the splitter, I don't currently have one. The one that I currently have all the coaxials hooked up to is a Multi-Switch that Directv uses for their dish but it will be going bye-bye once I switch to Fios. I assume that the Fios installer should have a 1GHz splitter with him, right? Otherwise I hope I can buy one somewhere instead of having to order it online.


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## bigguy126 (Sep 4, 2007)

AlexFL said:


> I am going to give Moca a try as I have already invested in buying the Actiontec Moca adapter. I think Moca sounds pretty efficient and not to mention fast.
> 
> As far as the splitter, I don't currently have one. The one that I currently have all the coaxials hooked up to is a Multi-Switch that Directv uses for their dish but it will be going bye-bye once I switch to Fios. I assume that the Fios installer should have a 1GHz splitter with him, right? Otherwise I hope I can buy one somewhere instead of having to order it online.


If you make friends with the installer, he/she may GIVE you a additional actiontec router. You then can use it to act as a bridge to give you ethernet access in your Bedroom. I did. Here is a link from dslreports on how to change the settings on the 2nd router:

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/verizonfios/3.0_Networking#15984


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## sabre70 (Mar 28, 2010)

Alex, You would think coax is coax but I had a run that was RG59 rather than rg6 quad shield and I had issues streaming over the coax. Just wanted you to have the tech check your moca transfer rates thats all. They usually only test signal strength. Good luck


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## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

Great info bigguy126 and sabre70, thanks a lot. I'll see if I can persuade the installer for a new router. I'm not wondering what kind of coaxial Directv installed in my house a couple of years ago? RG59 or RG6? Hopefully is the latter and I'm hoping is written on the side of it when I check tomorrow. Thanks again to everyone for your input and I'll be posting my results in a couple of days. Today I fired up the TiVo boxes and I must say the Premiere is a Great improvement over my last TiVo box. Although I got no Fios yet, I enjoyed watching YouTube videos, pretty cool!


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

AlexFL said:


> Great info bigguy126 and sabre70, thanks a lot. I'll see if I can persuade the installer for a new router. I'm not wondering what kind of coaxial Directv installed in my house a couple of years ago? RG59 or RG6? Hopefully is the latter and I'm hoping is written on the side of it when I check tomorrow. Thanks again to everyone for your input and I'll be posting my results in a couple of days. Today I fired up the TiVo boxes and I must say the Premiere is a Great improvement over my last TiVo box. Although I got no Fios yet, I enjoyed watching YouTube videos, pretty cool!


If the coax worked with DirecTV and had no problems, there should be no issues with FiOS. DirecTV uses frequencies way above what FiOS uses.


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## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

Yeah, I just checked and it is RG6 all throughout.


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## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

OK, the results are in. Installation took place 2 days ago and following are my findings.
-Installer was supposed to come with 2 M-Cards based on my order that I had verified twice to make sure that it was correct. Unfortunately he didn't and his excuse was that in the last 6 years he's done 3 cable card installations. Based on that he's found that the majority of the people requesting cards didn't ultimately need them so he didn't bring them So we were off to a good start. He made a couple of calls and went back to the office to pick them up. Upon his return I proceded to tell him of my setup. He was a little confused by all the stuff that I was throwing at him so I decided to keep it simple. Pretty much plug these coaxials to the splitter here and then I'll show you where the boxes are located inside. For some stupid reason Verizon didn't let me place an order without any equipment so I ordered a STB for a TV in the guest house. The STB installation took less than 5 minutes, then he took the M-Cards out and wrote their serial numbers and handed them to me. I inserted them in the Premiere boxes. It took about 5-10 seconds for them to recognize them and when they did so, they provided this screen given other serial numbers and codes that the installer then wrote down. It also provided with a phone number for the installer to call, even though he didn't do that. Next he got into his laptop and proceded to activate the M-Cards. The whole process would have been pretty quick except one of the cards was not been accepted in his system so thankfully he was proactive when he went back to the office and grabbed an extra card. After trying several minutes on one of the M-Cards he then gave up on it and proceded to get the extra one from his truck. The M-Card install technically took less than 10 minutes, specially because he did it through his computer and there was no calling anyone to activate the cards. Given the fact that I already had the RG6 prewired by Directv, he only had to unplug the needed coaxials from the directv switchbox and plug them into the new Fios splitter.

I ended up using the Actiontec Moca Adapter as indicated on my diagram and the configuration of that was absolutely simple. Pretty much you plug it and that's it. Even the installer was pretty impressed, so much so that he wrote down the name of it since he had never seen such a thing before. I did ask him for the router, explaining him that I needed to use it for the guest house and able to use the Moca features of it. He proceded to tell me that it wouldn't work because that router would be competing to become the primary router along with the one that I already had. I didn't want to spend much of my breath explaining him that it wouldn't happen as long as I modified some settings in it before hand. Nevertheless he said, well I don't think that you can make that work but I'll leave it with you so that you can "play" with it. That was very nice of him but I think that by that time he just wanted to get going given the fact that he'd already spent close to 3 hours on my install (most of it was traveling back and forth getting the cards).

Once he left I checked everything and after 2 days is still working flawlessly. The router he left behind was a Westell and that kind of concerned me since the one I already had was an Actiontec. I set that up as well in the guest house and it worked as simple as the other adapter, plug and play! So I guess now my guests won't be able to complain that they get poor wifi reception in my house

The setup remained the same as I had diagrammed above. I didn't have to use any attenuators and no POE. Even though I used a 6 way splitter (2 additional ones not drawn in my diagram because those were last minute coaxials that were added to go to the guest house) the signal remained pretty strong to all receivers. I currently get about 97%-98% on all of them. Moca connections are SUPER FAST, I did a couple of transfers from one Tivo to the other one and I was getting 93MBps. I ended up going with an ethernet connection from my Tivo #1 to my Airport Extreme so that's pretty much all I had to do.

Overall I say that the installation would've taken no more than 30 minutes if the installer would've done everything right. Can't blame him too much, after all he was pretty pleasant.

I hope the information posted here is helpful to other people looking to do a similar setup:up:


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

That seems to be typical with the FioS installers I've seen. They really don't know much about networking and even less about cable cards.

At least he was able to go back to the office and get the cable cards.


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## Gerhard (Sep 29, 2002)

I've got a combination of motorola nim-100s and the actioniotec coax bridges. Verizon never asked me if I needed the actioniotec router! So this confuses the heck out of the installers when they show up...

At this point all of the tivos are attachedbto Ethernet overcoat, and run through an IPS on a separate vlan. Smile. No reason to give an external vendor access to you home network if you have the time and can avoid it.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Gerhard said:


> I've got a combination of motorola nim-100s and the actioniotec coax bridges. Verizon never asked me if I needed the actioniotec router! So this confuses the heck out of the installers when they show up...
> 
> At this point all of the tivos are attachedbto Ethernet overcoat, and run through an IPS on a separate vlan. Smile. No reason to give an external vendor access to you home network if you have the time and can avoid it.


I don't let them touch any of my equipment. Not even a remote. Especially when they tell you some crap that they have to install software on your PC which is a complete lie.


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

aaronwt said:


> I don't let them touch any of my equipment. Not even a remote. Especially when they tell you some crap that they have to install software on your PC which is a complete lie.


My tech was great. He asked if I wanted the software. I gave him a horrified look and then admitted how awful it was and how he hated having to install it on people computers.


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## plazman30 (Jan 23, 2005)

The FIOS tech left my house at 2:00PM. All he did was slide the cable card in, activate with some software (make sure you have a Windows PC for him to use in the house), and then the thing just fires up.

Definitely set it up before hand. Setup took well over an hour with the 14.6 software update getting pulled down and installed, and all the FIOS channel data needing to download. You can even setup your season passes, if you want to, but if a show is set to record before they put the cable card in, you'll get an hour of black screen.

Amazon VOD, Netflix, Pandora, Youtube, and Music Choice videos will all work before the Cable Card is put in. So will transfers you make via pyTivo. So, you can get a lot of uses out of the box before the FIOS guy even gets there.

DirecTV uses RG-6 cable, which is the same grade that FIOS uses, so the guy could reuse the existing coax in the house, which is what the guy did for me.

I have everything connected via Ethernet for the Tivo, since I have a gigabit router and am moving stuff to the Tivo using pyTivo.


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

plazman30 said:


> The FIOS tech left my house at 2:00PM. All he did was slide the cable card in, activate with some software (make sure you have a Windows PC for him to use in the house), and then the thing just fires up.
> 
> Definitely set it up before hand. Setup took well over an hour with the 14.6 software update getting pulled down and installed, and all the FIOS channel data needing to download. You can even setup your season passes, if you want to, but if a show is set to record before they put the cable card in, you'll get an hour of black screen.
> 
> ...


You let the tech touch your computer? Did he install Verizon Spyware? The tech should have his own computer to activate. He doesn't "need" to use yours. I would NEVER let a tech use my computer for any reason.


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## dsa1971 (Feb 10, 2008)

aadam101 said:


> You let the tech touch your computer? Did he install Verizon Spyware? The tech should have his own computer to activate. He doesn't "need" to use yours. I would NEVER let a tech use my computer for any reason.


You're correct. They have their own computer for that. As others have noted also they're clueless about the cable cards. It is pretty amazing considering there is really nothing particularly complicated about setting up the cable cards


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## plazman30 (Jan 23, 2005)

aadam101 said:


> You let the tech touch your computer? Did he install Verizon Spyware? The tech should have his own computer to activate. He doesn't "need" to use yours. I would NEVER let a tech use my computer for any reason.


He popped a thumb drive in. Ran some software off of it. It didn't install anything.


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## plazman30 (Jan 23, 2005)

dsa1971 said:


> You're correct. They have their own computer for that. As others have noted also they're clueless about the cable cards. It is pretty amazing considering there is really nothing particularly complicated about setting up the cable cards


Cablecards he knew... Tivo he did not. The Tivo however, made it really really easy for the tech.

Andy


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

plazman30 said:


> He popped a thumb drive in. Ran some software off of it. It didn't install anything.


I'm not sure why he would need to do that.


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

aadam101 said:


> I'm not sure why he would need to do that.


It activates your FIOS service. He runs some program which also launches your web browser. You have to electronically agree to the terms of service before it gets activated. There is also this "in-home agent" software that let's them troubleshoot simple problems without you having to call in. I disabled its autostart, but left it in the PC. You shouldn't be worried about spy software with your ISP -- they are already recording every IP address you visit without it. The tech might have a virus on that USB stick, though.

My tech didn't know anything about routers or firewalls either. After he left, I figured out how to reset to factory default settings and set it up myself.


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## Quake97 (Apr 24, 2006)

The USB drive is software they can run to activate "stuff" instead of using their laptops. When they asked me, I told the guy to go get his laptop. They aren't going to use my computer, sorry.

As for the CC install, the problem with some of the CCs not work is related to whether they're listed as in inventory or checked out in their system. Since they don't use them very often, then don't get inventoried properly. The system needs to show them as checked out, I believe, before they can be activated from the laptop.

Joe


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

BobCamp1 said:


> It activates your FIOS service. He runs some program which also launches your web browser. You have to electronically agree to the terms of service before it gets activated. There is also this "in-home agent" software that let's them troubleshoot simple problems without you having to call in. I disabled its autostart, but left it in the PC. You shouldn't be worried about spy software with your ISP -- they are already recording every IP address you visit without it. The tech might have a virus on that USB stick, though.
> 
> My tech didn't know anything about routers or firewalls either. After he left, I figured out how to reset to factory default settings and set it up myself.


Exactly. Who says the software can't monitor other stuff. My computer consists of more than a bunch of IP addresses.


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