Didn’t know where else to ask this so figured this would be the best place. What exactly is Coax used for? I ask because i’m self installing new Xfinity internet and the instructions say to plug in the Coax and what not. What exactly does that do? It that how the gateway actually gets internet or does it simply “distribute” the internet to other parts of the house?
Truly could not find a good answer on google so just wondering if it’s truly necessary or does simply plugging the gateway in work?
Mind you im not getting cable or anything like that. It’s simply wifi and that’s it. Thanks in advance.
Edit (Solved): To make things short, I plugged my Xfi gateway into these coax outlets in my house but they weren’t working. So, I tried plugging my Gateway directly into the main line outside and it works just fine meaning either the two ports I tried both happen to not work or the wires that take the connection to the rest of the house don’t work. So i’m gonna attempt to connect it in a port upstairs and see if it works just to confirm either possibility. But the problem is largely resolved. Thanks to the legends in the replies for the help!
In: 0
Coax is a type of wire. It’s a wire surrounded by an air gap and a circular metal shield. For various reasons this design makes it good to carry radio waves.
TV used to come from an antenna on your roof pointed at a transmitter. The signal comes from the antenna down a wire into the back of your TV.
Cable TV is where you don’t have an antenna, you have a wire that comes in from the street, from the cable TV company office, and into the back of your TV (or a cable TV box). In the old versions, the signal was the same as the TV antenna radio signal, so they used coax wire because it’s good at carrying radio signals.
They realized they can fit more channels in the wire, than the airwaves, because the radio signal inside the wire doesn’t have to compete with aircraft navigation and radar and FM radio and police radio and stuff. So they put extra channels into the part of the “fake airwaves” that would normally interfere with aircraft and radar and FM radio and police and stuff.
Eventually they upgraded it all to digital. More complicated. Still the same basic system. Still pretending to be a radio transmission but actually in a cable – still using a type of cable good at carrying radio transmissions.
Eventually they used part of the signal for internet signals. More complicated. Still the same basic system. Still pretending to be a radio transmission but actually in a cable – still using a type of cable good at carrying radio transmissions.
So the reason they use this type of cable is that the network goes back to cable TV when it was basically designed for carrying radio transmissions from an antenna and your internet is carried over pretend radio transmissions.
.
There’s more than one way you can get internet. This – cable TV internet – is one of them. The other kind of old-school one is to get internet over your phone line, called DSL. Phone lines are a much cheaper, shittier type of cable, so DSL internet on a phone cable is slower. But everyone gets their own separate phone cable, but everyone taps into the same cable TV cable and has to share it, so they’re both alright. That’s two ways to use the cables that were already there when the internet revolution happened. The third way is fiber. If you have a fiber cable, you can get really fast internet. But that’s not possible everywhere because they have to install new fiber cables to every house, so it’s cheaper to use the cable TV cable or the phone cable that you already have.
.
The edit is talking about the wiring inside your house. You own that, or your landlord does. The cable TV company hooks their cable TV cable up to the demarc box, and the rest of the wiring is up to you. You can have it wired to the living room TV. Remember this type of internet is piggybacking on cable TV wiring, so imagine the wiring is designed for how you use a cable TV, even though you don’t have it. Or wired to the computer room or the basement, your choice. Anywhere you want to and that’s your problem or your landlord’s problem. There is a wire, inside the walls, and if you could see inside the walls you could see it’s a normal wire, and maybe a mouse ate it while you weren’t looking and that’s why it doesn’t work. Anyway, replacing a mouse eaten cable is easy, except it’s hard because the stupid walls are in the way. Your choice if you want to make holes in the walls and find where the cable is broken and fix it. Or maybe there is no cable in the wall, maybe it got removed. X-ray vision would help you find the problem.
Former Xfinity employee here: you have one main coax line that goes into your home and it normally ends in your utility room. Also in the room will be other coax lines. These are connected to the coax outlets inside your house. Assuming you have just the gateway, you need to connect the line coming from outside to the line that does to the outlet you want to use. Then you connect another coax from the outlet to the back of the gateway.
If you are going to use multiple coax outlets throughout your house (i.e. you have the gateway and then maybe a cable box in another room) you would take the line from outside and connect into the “input” port of a 2-way splitter, then connect the lines going to the two outlets you want to use to the two “output” ports on the splitter.
Latest Answers