Sorry for the delay in responding... I've been "down" as well <sigh> Great input, thanks...
Some of my thoughts so far.
I have some devices on order including usb to ethernet that I plan to test when I have a moment.
My intent is to see if I can tether via ethernet (I did test tethering via wifi here in Austin, Texas but could never get wifi tethering to work in Oregon talking my wife through setting it up via phone)
It is my expectation that if I can get the phone to ethernet tether, I should then be able to connect the phone to the WAN port on the router. Doing that should read as the phone is connected to a single device while providing limited connection to everything on the LAN.
If that is successful, I can then power down all non essential iot devices and the remainder, such as the Ring doorbell, would be able to connect to the internet without having to reconfigure them... will report when I am able to test.
The neighbor connection is something I considered but we are brand new to the neighborhood, so don't know what type of responses to expect. We have a tech worker who lives next door and his signal is strong, but have not contacted him yet. The neighbor's wifi across the street who would be happy to help only shows a "dot" on the signal strength. This thread has provided a number of possibilities to establishing a neighbor's connection to our existing lan via our router.
In Oregon, xfinity's shared wifi is also an option, but I won't be able to test that until I am up there again and that will be several months.
Part of the reason for starting this thread was to underscore the need to prepare for outages since options are so scarce to begin with. The city (Eugene) where we are has a surprisingly high petty crime rate. The part that is especially disturbing is the huge potential of zero options with our current single source internet provider setups across the country.
Within a month of moving in, the Ring Doorbell that I installed woke me up after midnight to a woman intent on removing what was in our mailbox... paid for itself that night... was also a very interesting conversation. Without an internet connection, these devices are blind and deaf even though they have a good wifi connection.
The cable is back up. Two and a half days of (intentionally) very limited cellular data use racked up just over 2GB. This has been a valuable learning experience for me and I hope to others here.
>> check with Google about your router. I am not sure the usb/ethernet adapter will work <<
Will do if the phone/ethernet/routerWANport does not work. Then it's on to the
https://www.amazon.com/GL-iNet-GL-AR750S-Ext-pre-installed-Cloudflare-Included/dp/B07GBXMBQF devices.
Thanks again to everyone,
Beverly