What My goCoax MA2500D MoCA 2.5 Setup Actually Delivers: Real LAN Speed Test Results
By Paul S
A few days ago I published an article about planning my 10GbE home network. In it, I described how I’d gone from 400 Mbps over WiFi to 800 Mbps after installing a pair of goCoax MA2500D MoCA 2.5 adapters in my rental apartment — one in the office, one in the living room — and called it a win.
A Reddit commenter with a “Top 1% Commenter” badge politely dismantled my logic in public.
He pointed out that fast.com doesn’t measure your local network. It measures your connection to the internet. The 800 Mbps I was celebrating was my Verizon FiOS plan finally getting close to its rated speed over a wired backhaul — not a measure of what MoCA was delivering between devices on my LAN. Those are two completely different things.
He was right. And I’d never actually tested my LAN throughput at all.
The Difference Between WAN Speed and LAN Throughput
This is the mistake I made, and based on the Reddit responses, I’m not alone.
WAN speed (what fast.com and Speedtest.net measure) is how fast data travels between your home and the internet — Netflix’s servers, your ISP’s network, the outside world. Your router’s connection to your ISP determines this ceiling, and your internet plan caps it. MoCA can help you reach that ceiling by delivering a more reliable wired backhaul versus WiFi, but it doesn’t push past it.
LAN throughput is how fast data travels between devices inside your home — MacBook to NAS, office to living room, device to device over your local network. This is where MoCA’s specs actually live. When goCoax says the MA2500D delivers “2.5 Gbps bandwidth,” they mean on the local network, not to the internet.
If you only run internet speed tests, you don’t know what your MoCA setup is actually delivering. I didn’t.
How to Actually Test MoCA LAN Throughput
To test real LAN speed between two devices you need iPerf3 — a free tool that sends data directly between two machines on your network and measures actual throughput. No internet involved.
What you need:
- Two devices on your local network, both connected via Ethernet (not WiFi)
- iPerf3 installed on both
A WiFi device as one endpoint will bottleneck the result — the wireless leg becomes the limiting factor, not MoCA. For a clean test both ends need to be wired.
Install iPerf3 on Mac:
brew install iperf3
Install iPerf3 on Windows:
Download the binary from iperf.fr — no installer, just extract and run from Command Prompt.
Run the test:
On the server device (find your local IP first):
ipconfig getifaddr en0
iperf3 -s
On the client device:
iperf3 -c 192.168.1.x
Replace with your server’s actual local IP. The test runs 10 seconds and reports throughput in Mbps.
To test the reverse direction:
iperf3 -c 192.168.1.x -R
My Real Results: 249–480 Mbps, and Why They’re Asymmetric
I ran this test between my MacBook Pro in the office and my wife’s MacBook Air in the living room — both connected via Ethernet to their respective MA2500D adapters, with the coax backhaul running between rooms.
| Direction | Throughput |
|---|---|
| Living room → Office | 480 Mbps |
| Office → Living room | 249 Mbps |
Two things worth unpacking.
The asymmetry. Nearly twice as fast in one direction as the other is a significant gap. The most likely explanation: an older MoCA node somewhere in my apartment building’s coax infrastructure. MoCA is backward compatible — a MoCA 2.5 adapter will connect to older MoCA 2.0 or 1.x nodes on the same coax network, but the older node drags the link speed down. It can also affect each direction differently depending on where in the coax path it sits.
Cable splitters are another culprit. A non-MoCA-compatible splitter anywhere in the coax run introduces signal loss that limits throughput — and in a NYC rental, I have zero visibility into what’s inside my walls.
The 480 Mbps ceiling. The goCoax MA2500D has a 2.5GbE Ethernet port, so the adapter itself isn’t the bottleneck — it’s theoretically capable of pushing past 1 Gbps to connected devices. The coax backhaul between the two adapters is the limiting factor here, almost certainly due to whatever is degrading the MoCA signal in my building’s infrastructure.
For reference, goCoax states that under ideal conditions the MoCA link rate between two MA2500D adapters should be around 3,500 Mbps. I’m getting a fraction of that — which tells me my coax environment has real limitations I can’t easily fix in a rental.
What This Means in Context
Here’s the honest picture of where I am versus where I’m going:
| Connection | Measured Throughput |
|---|---|
| WiFi (rental) | ~400 Mbps internet speed |
| MoCA 2.5 MA2500D — LAN (living room → office) | 480 Mbps |
| MoCA 2.5 MA2500D — LAN (office → living room) | 249 Mbps |
| Target: 10GbE Cat6A structured cabling (new condo) | ~9,400 Mbps |
MoCA was the right call for a rental where I couldn’t run cable. It improved my internet reliability and gave me a wired backhaul I wouldn’t otherwise have had. But the asymmetric LAN throughput — and the hard ceiling I’m hitting due to coax infrastructure I can’t control — reinforces exactly why I’m building proper structured cabling in the condo I just bought.
A direct Cat6A run doesn’t care about what’s in the walls. There’s no coax splitter, no legacy MoCA node, no signal degradation to account for. You get what the cable and hardware are rated for.
Test Your Own Setup
If you have MoCA adapters and you’ve only run internet speed tests, you don’t actually know what your LAN throughput looks like. The test takes five minutes. You might find your MoCA is performing well. You might find, like I did, there’s a bottleneck hiding in your coax path.
Either way — knowing is better than assuming.
Gear Referenced
- goCoax MA2500D MoCA 2.5 Adapter (2-Pack) — The MA2500D is the right adapter for most MoCA 2.5 setups — the 2.5GbE port means the adapter won’t be your bottleneck. My limitations were in the coax, not the hardware.
- iPerf3 — free, available at iperf.fr
Planning a full 10GbE structured cabling install in a new condo? I’m documenting the whole process — gear decisions, AV installer walkthrough, and real-world speed tests after move-in. Start here: How I’m Planning a 10GbE Home Network From Scratch