Do it on your phone. Just a suggestion.... I would purchase a wifi card for you desktop. Comcast may have a hotspot in your area. I would also suggest you create a live usb stick. It can be very useful, like a 2nd computer on a stick. It's really simple to do. https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick You can shoot them an [email protected] and include a link to your question on this forum.

my phone is a non smartphone with no typing capability.

Roger that.  ;-))

so far the email did not come back as non deliverable.

Not aware of your financials, but I would also suggest you visit eBay and have a look at a good used laptop. It would really be helpful right now. The live usb stick would also help and cost much less. ;-))

it is back up. i managed to have somebody email them telling of my problem.

this is what happened.

Hi Paul,

Looks like your IP triggered a network security alert which blocked it from our servers for a few weeks. This is not a common issue, and who knows if it will -ever- happen again, but if it does, just submit a support ticket from a device on a different network. Perhaps your phone while on 3g.

Which is why I was hoping you could get have the modem copy your mac address to force your ISP to give a different IP address.  ;-)) Is it working now?

If so, mark this very long journey as resolved.  ;-))

thanks for all the help.

No problem. Seriously consider getting a good used laptop from eBay. Just like in life... you need to have options when something happens.  ;-))

Normally you would get a 403 Forbidden error when your IP address is blocked, their method of blocking with a connection timeout made it look like a network issue.

You might want to edit the quoted email correspondence so your IP address is not public.