Netgear MCAB1001 Review

Do you have trouble getting Wifi signals to reach all the rooms in your house?

Do you wish you could have higher bandwidth to certain parts of your house – like your game console?

Are you unable or unwilling to fish your walls with ethernet to solve the above problems?

Have you tried Powerline ethernet and been unimpressed with the results?

The Netgear MCAB1001 may be the answer to your prayers – it was for me.

I have had all of the above problems in my home network, so I had to try this new Netgear product, which uses your homes existing cable television coax wiring to bridge your ethernet around the house effortlessly.

The kit is comprised of two separate but identical units – simply plug one end into you router and cable coax (there is a pass-through patch cable so you can still use the same coax jack for cable television), and the other end into a remote coax jack and your ethernet-connected device, and presto – Fast Ethernet.

And when I say Fast Ethernet, I mean it – I was able to get about 90 Mbps real throughput (tested using a LAN FTP transfer), which is about the maximum real-world speed of 100 Mbps ethernet. There was no configuration, it just ‘worked’.

If you want to plug multiple devices on the remote end (as I did – it is sitting behind my TV and needs to feed my game consoles, TiVo, remote Wifi AP and internet-connected TV) – you just need to plug the remote end into a cheap router (as the remote device itself only exposes a single IP address).

Previously, the only way to accomplish this type of thing without wifi or ethernet was to use Powerline ethernet, which is basically an identical solution except that it uses your AC wiring. The problem with Powerline is that the real throughput speed can vary widely, and even in the best case maybe tops out at 45 Mbps – half that of the Coax product.

There is one issue I have with Netgear MCAB1001, however, and that is that it is advertised as being capable of 270 Mbps. According to my testing, the coax technology may indeed be capable of these speeds, but would require Gigabit ethernet cabling. The problem is, when I tested the units with various Gigabit switches and CAT-5e and CAT-6 cables, the switch would always report the unit as beeing 100 Mbps.

In other words, it seems that Negear has for some bizarre reason limited the product to ~90 Mbps by using Fast Ethernet, rather than Gig-E Ethernet interfaces on the device.

I sent Netgear an email asking them to clarify this, which went unanswered. Update: Netgear has responded – please see Chris Geiser’s comment – its the first one at the bottom of the review!

Nonetheless, the Netgear MCAB1001 is the best solution I have found to bridging ethernet around your home easily and at high speeds. I recommend it highly.

Disclosure: Amazon.com sent me this item free of charge for review on Amazon.com as part of the Amazon Vine program.