Life, Internet, Television

I can't get cable. The cable company stops running the line about a mile from my house. They refuse to turn the corner and come down our road. They claim not enough people live on said road that would want cable. From that corner to my house on my side of the road there are 6 houses. There are 2 more I can hit with a thrown rock past me. The other side of the road has 8 or 9 until my house. Maybe 17 isn't enough to justify the expense, but everyone of those houses have a satellite dish in the yard or on the house. I had no tv for the first year I lived there except the local pbs station and an occasional network if the wind was right. I later installed Primestar and had it for a couple of years. I then went to Dish Network until about a year ago. Financial issues caused me to ask them to turn off my service. I requested them to turn it off, they said okay and I disconnected my 2 boxes. I kept getting bills and they kept going up. I kept calling. Basically it took me 3 months to get them to turn off my service and they insisted I owed them for it. I never had the service for that time period, I didn't even have the boxes plugged in. So, until last week I had no television and watched everything streamed off the internet.

I missed a lot of stupid stuff like my history channel and military channel though, so I finally got TV back. I went to my telephone company to get it. They now offer digital cable. I got the 2 room package. Basically, they hook a faster modem up for my dsl and hook the 2 boxes into a dsl modem/router. Unfortunately this has caused problems. I had recently switched my 4 port router for a 4 port wireless "n" router. This let me keep all 4 computers hooked up and use my laptop. The router they brought was a 4 port with wireless g. They hooked my main computer and the 2 tv's in. Then they hooked my router to their router. I took some time off work to be there and I left when they did. I had some issues with my laptop, it was seeing the wireless network and connecting, but could not reach the internet.

After some research I tried several things. I reset my winsock, my tcip, ect. Then finally wiped my laptop and started reinstalling. After redoing windows and my drivers, it was still not working. Then it hit me, that I hadn't tried to use the internet, other than on my main computer since the switch. I tried, it failed. So more research. As of this date, I have an email in to their tech support. I cannot access their modem/router, they won't "for security reasons" give me a log in and password. So I cannot do anything with it. I have disconnected my wireless router completely. My laptop does not see a wireless network with my router turned off. I hooked my router to the laptop, accessed it and turned off the dhcp server. I changed its lan ip from 198.162.1.1 to 198.162.1.99. I then run a cat 5 from the last open lan port to a lan port on the linksys. Still no internet and now it won't assign an ip to my laptop. My second computer, hardwired to my router, but it also can't get onto the internet. My head hurts. I have reset the whole network so many times. Why the hell can't they put on/off switches on routers, whats with this unplug to turn off crap? Anybody got a suggestion?