I have yet to use MoCA and thus no practical experience with it. More than half a year ago I was introduced to MoCA by manyu882. After which I did some reading and understood a bit.
I try to answer some of the questions here:
Is starhub HD tv signal still good?
MoCA is design to co-exist with Cable TV and Cable Broadband. Cable TV and broadband utilized up to 890MHz, while MoCA LAN links uses above 1000MHz. There is no overlapping of frequency bands.
Nevertheless, there is possibility that non-MoCA devices (such as CATV STB in which the design might have neglect operating in a MoCA environment), can and may suffer out-of-band (OOB) interference from MoCA devices, in such case placing a MoCA POE filter in front of the STB can help block the interference.
MoCA POE filter has inserting loss of about 1.5dB, this is negligible to CATV (DVB-C digitalized signals, including HDTV) as the setup has much more build-in margin than that.
Of course there is always a finite numbers of passive splitters and filters that can be added before the CATV or cable broadband signals is reduced to below usable level.
Is POE filter must? Where can I get it locally?[/
POE filter at point-of-entry is a MUST. It serves 2 purposes:
1. Isolate the home network from causing interference to adjacent home. (Such as OOB interference as explained above)
2. Reflect the MoCA signals back to the network, this increase the signal level and quality of the MoCA signals and thus faster speed can be achieved.
(Note that standard CATV splitter required the port isolation (attenuation) between output ports to be high, while MoCA required low output port isolation. Inserting a POE filter work around this loss).
TS suggestion to disconnect the incoming main coax cable and terminate the splitter input with a 75 ohm terminator is thus not advisable, as the 75 ohm terminator will absorb rather than reflect the MoCA signals.
For more technical detail can refer to
http://www.mocalliance.org/technology/Final_Best-Practices-for-Installation-of-MoCA_170516rev01.pdf