One thing you can do, you said you have a buddy with the same router and if he's on the same ISP and near by, can you take your router to his place and put it on line and see what happens? Ask him if you can take his router to your place and put it online? Save off the config files for each and test them out on each others routers. This should let you know if there is an issue with your router or not. Would be a good test.