Maximum PC

I've been the happy owner of a Roku box for well over a year now. Recently, for some reason that is unknown to me, the Roku box is no longer "seeing" my wifi network. I've tried everything I can think of to fix the problem, but so far nothing has worked. I know the wifi is working because my laptop, iPod touch, and cell phone all connect to the wifi in the same room just fine. I've power cycled the Roku box, changed the location of the wifi router, changed the wifi broadcast channel, moved the Roku player around to different spots around the TV. Nothing has worked.

I'm at the point where I think the best solution would be to connect the Roku box to the Internet via the Ethernet port on the back of the Roku player and put this issue to bed for good. I have a coaxial cable connection in the room (for my cable TV) with the Roku box, but no Ethernet jack. I went to Radio Shack hoping to stumble on a solution and I noticed they were selling several brands of surge protectors that had coax inputs and Ethernet ports on them. The box's were light on the details, and all the descriptions on the boxes just say the Ethernet jacks are for "protecting" your Ethernet lines.

Before I plunk down the cash on one of these surge protectors, I was wondering if my solution is to simply plug my coax into the surge protector and run an ethernet cable from the surge protector to my Roku player. The solution feels to easy, and I get the feeling I'm missing something obvious.

Any thoughts on if this would work would be appreciated, or if you have another solution for me that would be great. As far as I can tell, my only other options would be to buy a cable modem or a power line networking device, both of which would cost almost as much as the Roku player itself.

Coax to ethernet does not exist! they don't "talk" to each other. you need to run cat5e to the Roku box if the you can't get the wireless to work.

I'm confused. A cable modem takes a coax cable "in" and sends the signal out over the ethernet jack on the modem to a PC. My thought was that these surge protectors were doing the same type of thing. Sounds like I was wrong?

the surge suppressor ethernet and coax connectors are not internally connected at all , it is just to ground and protect each type.

coax and ethernet are two entirely different animals. a cable modem is designed to talk to the cable co gear via coax and your network via ethernet (or USB sometimes) but it is a very specialized unit.

wait a sec...you have a wireless router that you're moving around and able to set things like broadcast?

Sounds like you Just get a new wireless router that also has ethernet ports then.

Who's your service through? there may be a different solution you can work with instead...