ok thanks Fraser. when I first set it up, all seemed good even with port forwarding in place on my ISP router. but I started tinkering around like an idiot and now in device manager, it says I'm connected to another router.
I'm going to start all over and hard reset everything. I have the instructions to make my ISP router into a bridge, etc etc, because I am not sure what exactly I screwed up lol.
I can still get into and play cod/iw games but it's definitely not optimized. thanks again!