Conclusion and Wrap-Up

I’ve gone back and forth on my conclusions from the testing of the WCB6200Q and the ECB6200.  Looking at ‘hard wired’ performance, there is definitely some overhead and degradation of speed related to converting your Ethernet network over to MoCA and then back again, regardless of the Coax cabling distance.  In the best case I still saw a 10% drop in performance versus normal Ethernet connectivity, but worst case we saw drops in performance closer to 30%.   I can’t say for certain if that’s just normal overhead for MoCA networks, or Actiontec’s implementation of it with the WCB6200Q / ECB6200. 

Wi-Fi performance of the WCB6200Q is whole different animal though.  Do you compare results against the ‘Marketing Fluff’ that just about every Wi-Fi vendor puts on their product or do you compare it to what people are really seeing in the real world?  To be honest, I think we really should be holding the vendor’s feet to the fire more on these ridiculous claims.  For a product that touts itself as a ‘Wireless Network Extender’ with ‘Up to 2 Gbps’ throughput, at no point in my testing did I come close to that.  Even if I take the best numbers from any of the test scenarios we barely cracked a combined 300 Mbps (0.3 Gbps) of throughput.  Now if you put things in perspective of what people really are seeing with equipment out there, the 5 Ghz performance wasn’t all that bad, but the 2.4 Ghz performance left something to be desired.

To sum it up, considering how good some of the new 802.11AC Wi-Fi routers that are hitting the market are, unless you absolutely have no choice in the matter but to try to push your network over Coax, I think you’d be better served by either buying a better base router or looking into a non MoCA based Wi-Fi Access Point/Repeater or a Range Extender.  Better yet, if at all possible, pull or buy a few long CAT 6 cables where they’re needed.  Whatever you do, it’ll likely be cheaper than the WCB6200Q/ECB6200 and you’ll see better performance in the end.

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