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My friend wanted to replace the cheapo router from Verizon with a good one she had previously bought, asked me to look at it for her. Turns out though, the ones from Verizon are all wired in to the modem via coaxial cable, whereas her good router is a standard CAT5 wire in.

Does anyone have any experience with coax-to-CAT5 converters, and could recommend brands and/or models that might be good, or ones that should be avoided?

Thanks!

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You may have a slight misunderstanding of the equipment. Without seeing specific model information, this is an educated guess, but likely correct. The Verizon equipment is a cable modem/router combination if there is coaxial input and RJ-45 connectors for equipment.

The signals from the provider are transported on RF (television/radio type) signals, received by the modem/router and converted to data, then sent to the RJ-45 via internal router.

Any "converter" you find will be a cable modem, with or without the router portion.

If the existing modem/router has four RJ-45 ports, you can connect your "good one" to one of those ports and make use of its features.

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  • If the OP is using Verizon FiOS, it sounds like the router uses MoCA as the WAN port, unlike a traditional cable modem: forums.verizon.com/t5/Fios-Internet/…
    – browly
    Oct 12, 2017 at 16:18
  • I may have a slight misunderstanding of the equipment. Living in the dark ages, I don't have fiber access, as the Google internet blimps have not yet stationed over my area. With my lack of understanding of MoCA WAN/LAN, only half of my answer is correct, the portion contained in the last sentence.
    – fred_dot_u
    Oct 12, 2017 at 17:53
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MoCA WAN Bridge

Assuming your friend is using Verizon FiOS, the "modem" you're talking about is an Optical Network Terminal (ONT), and it connects to the Verizon router via MoCA WAN (not to be confused with MoCA LAN). There's a good summary here about the various router configurations.

What you're describing sounds most like option 10 on that page, so you would need a single MoCA WAN bridge like the D-Link DXN-221. This reviewer indicated they were able to replace their Verizon FiOS router with this device.

Most MoCA adapters are LAN only and won't work for the WAN connection from the router to the ONT.

Since a MoCA WAN bridge is so expensive/hard to find, I recommend you stick with fred_dot_u's suggestion and just use the Verizon router as the bridge to the router.

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