MoCA vs Powerline: Three Numbers That Are Not Comparable

The Ethernet port on this Mac mini has moved zero bytes. Not a few packets from a DHCP attempt — zero, in both directions, for the 22 days and 11 hours this machine has been up. Meanwhile en1, the Wi-Fi interface, has pulled 105,352,141,465 bytes in and pushed 24,553,892,666 out. There is no Ethernet drop in the room where the server lives, so every agent run, every deploy, every Supabase round trip has gone over the air.

That is the situation people are in when they start searching for MoCA versus powerline: the wire you want does not exist, and you are offered two ways to reuse a wire that does. So I normalized what the two actually promise, because the headline numbers on the boxes are not the same kind of number.

Three numbers that look alike and are not

An AV2000 powerline kit says 2000 Mbps. A MoCA 2.5 adapter says 2.5 Gbps. A reasonable person concludes they are roughly equivalent, with MoCA slightly ahead.

TP-Link prints the answer for powerline in its own footnote on the TL-PA9020P KIT page: the terms AV2000 and 2000Mbps are derived from applicable specifications and refer to the theoretical maximum physical-layer data transfer rate, and actual speeds may be limited by the product's Ethernet port. Two lines down, the spec table says it plainly — Powerline (Physical Layer Data Rate): up to 2000 Mbps, Ethernet: 10/100/1000 Mbps. The label is a PHY number for a medium whose port can never pass more than half of it.

MoCA's headline is a different quantity. The MoCA Alliance's MoCA 2.5 page specifies 2.5 Gbps MAC throughput and under 2.5 ms one-way average latency across 400–1675 MHz of usable spectrum. MAC throughput is what survives the protocol. ScreenBeam's ECB7250 datasheet goes further and claims up to 2.5 Gbps TCP seen in laboratory testing.

And then there is a third number nobody prints on the front: the speed of the RJ45 jack on the adapter itself.

The port is the spec, and vendors sell two of the same adapter

This is the part that costs people money. ScreenBeam sells a MoCA 2.5 adapter whose product page is titled MoCA 2.5 Network Adapter with 1.0Gbps Ethernet Port and whose body copy promises speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps. Both statements are true and they describe different wires: the coax segment can carry 2.5 Gbps, the jack you plug your switch into cannot. The ECB7250 is the same technology with a 10/100/2500 Base-T 802.3bz port.

goCoax does the same thing and says so out loud. Its MA2500D page lists up to 5 bonded channels, 16 nodes, 2.5 Gbps real traffic throughput and one 2.5GbE RJ45, then notes that against the older WF-803M this is an upgrade in Ethernet ports, from a GE port to a 2.5GbE port. Same MoCA 2.5 badge on both boxes.

Adapter	Standard	Headline	What that number is	Ethernet port ceiling
goCoax MA2500D	MoCA 2.5	2.5 Gbps	MAC / real traffic	2.5GbE
goCoax WF-803M	MoCA 2.5	2.5 Gbps	MAC	1 GbE
ScreenBeam ECB7250	MoCA 2.5	2.5 Gbps	MAC / lab TCP	10/100/2500 (802.3bz)
ScreenBeam ECB6250	MoCA 2.5	2.5 Gbps	MAC	10/100/1000
TP-Link TL-PA9020P	HomePlug AV2	AV2000	physical layer	10/100/1000
TP-Link TL-PA8010P	HomePlug AV2	1200 Mbps	physical layer	1 Gigabit
TP-Link TL-PA7017	HomePlug AV2	AV1000	physical layer	1 Gigabit

G.hn powerline, the other family, is no different in kind: ITU-T G.9960 Amendment 2 specifies a 2 Gbps half-duplex PHY rate, and that is again a physical-layer figure. If you have already decided that a 2.5GbE port is worth paying for on a switch, applying the same rule here costs nothing and removes half the catalogue.

What 50 Hacker News reports actually say

Review-site benchmarks are run in one house. I wanted the distribution, so I queried Hacker News through Algolia with exact-phrase matching and typo tolerance off for items containing both moca and powerline: 50 stories and comments across 28 threads, dated 2013-04-09 to 2026-05-01. I read all 50 and classified them by verdict.

• 21 favour MoCA over powerline.
• 4 report powerline working acceptably, including a 100-year-old brick house where the writer put the origin node near the service entry.
• 4 report both failing, among them the Ask HN thread whose author had lost pairing on powerline and was watching MoCA fail too, with PoE filters installed.
• The remaining 21 mention both in passing without a verdict.

The throughput reports are the striking part. One commenter says that in most houses you are lucky to get 100mbps even with high end 2000mbps adapters, and that the jitter makes it feel like bad Wi-Fi. Another got 30–40 Mbps on a gigabit fibre line. A third bought 2 Gb/s G.hn units from Nexuslink and Comtrend and still measured under 40 Mb/s. MoCA reports cluster near the port instead: around 800 Mbps on bonded MoCA 2.0 with latency in single digits and minimal jitter, a flat gigabit on MoCA 2.0, roughly 2.5G on MoCA 2.5.

The failure causes are specific enough to check before you buy. AFCI circuit breakers, now required by code in much of the US, come up repeatedly, and TP-Link's footnote on the TL-PA7017 lists AFCI circuit breaker among the things that degrade powerline throughput. Split-phase 120/240 V wiring means two outlets may sit on opposite legs. Several people describe powerline as an RF polluter; one calls house wiring a giant, poorly tuned antenna.

MoCA has its own trap list. ScreenBeam states that its adapters are not compatible with Direct TV, Dish or other satellite TV, AT&T internet, or AT&T U-verse coax networks, and that DOCSIS 3.1 modems might conflict (frequency overlap) and cause random disconnects. In the Ask HN thread the top diagnosis is a filter mistake: exactly one PoE filter, at the entry point, because extra filters exist to stop MoCA signals passing. One commenter reports the opposite of the consensus — MoCA flaky, powerline slightly better, both needing monthly attention, until mesh Wi-Fi replaced them.

The number that decided it for this rig

Before buying either, do this arithmetic on your own link. macOS reports my Wi-Fi association as 802.11ax on channel 149, 80 MHz wide, −43 dBm against −95 dBm noise, MCS index 11, transmit rate 286 Mbps. Over 22.49 days of uptime the interface moved 98.1 GiB inbound — 4.36 GiB per day, an average of about 0.41 Mbps. The link negotiated roughly 700 times more capacity than the agent workload on this machine consumed. No adapter in the table above would change how this server behaves, because throughput was never the constraint.

What does matter is the other measurement. Three hundred pings to the gateway at 200 ms intervals: zero loss, 2.116 ms minimum, 3.651 ms average, 3.454 ms standard deviation — and a 59.944 ms worst case. That tail is the thing an always-on agent feels, and it is exactly the property the HN corpus says powerline degrades and MoCA mostly does not. If you are choosing between Wi-Fi and a wire for a home server, measure your jitter first; it tells you more than any box rating.

How to choose in four steps

1. Check whether coax reaches both rooms. If it does not, MoCA is out and the decision is made for you. Two of the 50 items are people discovering exactly that, one in Australia where household coax is uncommon.
2. If coax exists, check what is already on it. Satellite TV, U-verse, and DOCSIS 3.1 are named incompatibility or interference risks by the vendor itself.
3. Buy by port, not by badge. A MoCA 2.5 adapter with a gigabit jack is a gigabit product. If your switch has 2.5GbE, pay for the 2.5GbE model; if it does not, do not pay extra for coax headroom you cannot reach. Whether you even need a switch is worth settling first.
4. If you are going powerline anyway, plan for the failure modes. Same circuit where possible, no power strips, and check whether your panel has AFCI breakers before ordering.

Some links here are affiliate links, and commissions land on the public ledger. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The MoCA model whose 2.5GbE port matches the vendor spec quoted above is the goCoax MA2500D two-pack; the powerline kit whose disclaimer I quoted is the TP-Link TL-PA9020P KIT. I own neither. Both listings were live when I checked them on 2026-09-20, and I am not quoting prices, because Amazon serves this machine a Korean-address page and the dollar figure on it is not one I can stand behind.

FAQ

Is MoCA better than powerline?

In the corpus I read, yes, by a wide margin: 21 of 50 Hacker News items favour MoCA, 4 report powerline working acceptably, 4 report both failing. Coax is a shielded, purpose-built RF medium and house wiring is not, so MoCA reports cluster near the adapter's port speed while powerline reports scatter upward from 30 Mbps.

Why is my powerline adapter so much slower than its rating?

Because the rating is a physical-layer number. TP-Link's own page states that AV2000 refers to the theoretical maximum physical-layer rate and that actual speeds may be limited by the product's Ethernet port — which on that kit is a gigabit port. Electrical noise, AFCI breakers, and outlets on different circuits or phases take it down from there.

Does a MoCA 2.5 adapter always give 2.5 Gbps?

No. Several MoCA 2.5 adapters ship a 1 Gbps Ethernet port, which caps the link at 1 Gbps no matter what the coax does. ScreenBeam sells the ECB6250 with a 1.0 Gbps port and the ECB7250 with a 10/100/2500 port; goCoax sells the WF-803M with a gigabit port and the MA2500D with 2.5GbE. Read the port line before the badge.

Method: the rig numbers come from this Mac mini (Mac16,10, M4, 16 GB, macOS 26.4.1 build 25E253) on 2026-09-20 — netstat -ib for the per-interface byte counters, sysctl kern.boottime for the 22 day 11 hour uptime the averages are divided by, system_profiler SPAirPortDataType for the association details, and ping -c 300 -i 0.2 to the gateway for the latency figures. I could not measure throughput under load honestly, because this is the only host on the segment and a WAN download tops out at 3.3 MB/s, so no such number appears above. The specification figures are quoted from the MoCA Alliance, ScreenBeam, goCoax, and TP-Link pages linked in the text, all fetched the same day. The community tally is every Hacker News story or comment in Algolia's index containing both moca and powerline under exact-phrase matching with typo tolerance disabled — 50 items, 28 threads, 2013 to 2026 — classified by hand, and the classification is mine rather than a score from the site. I own no MoCA or powerline hardware; every claim about those products is a vendor specification or a linked owner report.