[tranquility]

Originally Posted by GolfCoyote

Its literally like one screw, just pop the cover off the wall and look. My last house had this exact issue.

If the cable is there, there should be one area in your home where the ISP primary ethernet is run, your modem HAS to be plugged into that one. If you want your other ethernet ports plugs in your home to work your modem will need to have extra ports on it and those ethernet outlets will need to be plugged into the modem. Here's a photo of my setup for you to make sense of it better.

Modem (black cable) is plugged into my mesh network router, mesh router (yellow cable) is then plugged into my ethernet switch, my ethernet outlets (the blue cables) are plugged into the ethernet switch. I then have another mesh router plugged into an ethernet outlet downstairs along with whatever else plugged into the outlets throughout my house.

I appreciate your post but the point is moot for me cuz the ISP said they can only have 1 outlet working at a time, so even if my bedroom outlet is wired, I'm not going to arrange to move my modem there at the expense of shutting down my living room outlet.

I just have a very basic setup: it's the cable from my living room wall outlet to the modem, modem ethernet to my wifi router, which has 4 ports for ethernet wires (none being used rn...previously I had 1 for my laptop when it was there); my bedroom laptop is just getting wifi atm. I guess my solution if I really want ethernet in the bedroom is to run a very long cable but I don't want to bother doing that. My router is ancient (~14 yrs old) but still alright so I'm not planning on upgrading any time soon. I guess I have to be satisfied w this setup unless there's something totally obvious that I missed.