My cousin has a wireless bridge he's not using right now, so he's going to try and find it and lend it to me until I figure something else out.
Interesting observation: when my internet is on, holy crap it's on. I managed to get into Call of Duty 4 multiplayer and found out the top four servers were roughly 22, 24, 27, and 34. About thirty seconds later, of course, when the internet decided to epicfail again, I was at about 2000 at best. @_@
The lower ping could be that I'm closer to the servers, but I think the connection speed might also be a factor.