Hooray for internet! Apparently, this phoneline/usb dealie actually does work fairly well. I'm not sure why it wasn't working with my laptop last night, but whatever, it seems to be working now. From my good friends at DSL Reports: 1096 kbps down ans 204 kbps up (close enough to the published values of 1.5Mbps and 256 kbps). Now to set the DHCP lease time to something longer than 1 hour...