As someone who works with ISPs frequently, I can safely tell you that most of them are marginal at best and a stinking armpit at worst. Residential service tends to be particularly rife with regular outages, support services that seem intentionally obtuse, and universally overprovisioned nodes that result in lower-than-advertised speeds being almost ubiquitous. However, there are a few things that you can do to try to mitigate these problems.
If you aren’t doing so already, make sure you contact your ISP’s sales department at least once every few years to ask about renegotiating your contract. This typically will get you improvements in speed, at the very least. The speed increase might not be noticeable all the time (see my bit about overprovisioned nodes in paragraph #1), but it is usually an overall improvement.
If you are currently feeling the hurt from your current ISP not providing what you need and you are able to break contract, consider shopping around for a new provider. Ask your neighbors who their provider is, and how reliable their service is in-person. Or, Nextdoor will provide you with better information than the internet, as service tends to vary based on where you are located.
It feels like most ISPs have about 10 different phone numbers you can call for support and they all take you to a different phone tree. If you aren’t getting anywhere with one phone number, trying surfing around the World Wide Web a bit to track down a different one.
If we’re talking about business service and uptime is a major concern, consider using service from two different ISPs. No ISP can provide 100% uptime, but with always-on connections to two different providers, the chances of overlapping downtime on both is slim.
Good luck with your internet problems and DON’T FORGET to give the Birds a call if the ‘eggs are in the scramble.’