ive had to use both cat5 and coax with uverse before. it works fine. the nice thing about doing that is if you have a box hooked up with a coax to the uverse network and have no cat5 at that location,you can use the cat5 jack on back of the cable box. that saved my butt one day when the wifi card in the apple tv went out and we just went out of the cable box into the apple tv and was able to fix it.