Hey all. Long time lurker, first time poster.

I've had U-verse for almost a year. Love almost everything about it. The only thing I don't like is the location of the RG. As a result, all of my network devices have to run over Wi-Fi. This isn't a huge issue, but gets costly having to purchase adaptors for things that only have an Ethernet jack and no internal Wi-Fi. 

In the living room, where the TV etc. is set up, there is a phone line that comes up through the floor (very old building) and connects to a little brown box. From that box there are what appear to be two ethernet ports. One of them is occupied by a cable. This cable then goes to another little in-line converter that changes the cabling to coax. The coax then runs to the DVR.I was hoping that I could use the other port for a hard wired ethernet connection. But when I connected a cable to my laptop, it didn't register at all. So I tried the port that was in use by the cable to the DVR thinking it's already connected to the network so it should work. Same thing, no internet connection. It continued to say that a cable was not connected.

All four ports on the RG are open, so I don't know where the cable is getting the TV data feed from. Maybe directly from the phone line? Bypassing the RG doesn't make sense to me.

Does anyone know what might be happening here? Thanks for any help!