Michael Switching your internet provider is risky because being without internet even for a few days is not feasible nowadays. However, after the phone company AT&T had annoyed me for years by charging $10 just to tell me the calling number (Caller ID), I was practically waiting to get back at the sluggish monopoly.
A while ago, a company called Sonic.net from the North Bay entered the market, leasing telephone lines from AT&T on the "last mile" and offering telephone and internet services at bargain prices. If there's a problem, instead of script-reading AT&T drones from India, you get real Californians on the line at Sonic.net's customer service, who don't talk nonsense but provide technically knowledgeable answers.
Instead of shelling out $80 a month for a landline with 1.5Mbit internet and paying absurd dollar amounts (!) per minute for calls to Germany, we now pay $50 a month for everything combined. We get the same landline, free calls within the USA, a rate of $0.04 per minute to Germany, and 12Mbit internet.
At the agreed-upon date, the Sonic people switched the connection almost seamlessly, and after a few minor issues that customer service easily resolved, we are now surfing the internet almost ten times faster and saving $30 a month. Highly recommended, these Sonic folks. And according to a recently published newspaper article, they are even testing one hundred times faster internet connections. If only they don't overreach with it, my connection speed is completely sufficient for me!