Are Century Link and Xfinity the only 2 options?  I never gave it much thought before because it hasn't been an issue until this year.

Wife is working from home 2 kids are now stuck remote learning, so devices just randomly stop data feeds.  Seriously, there are 2 Zoom lessons for school, conference calls, Netflix in the background, Disney+ on the TV in the family room, all running simultaneously and someone eventually gets picked at random to have their data stop hard.  I think I once saw the router holding up a sign begging to be put out of its misery. At least I still have to be physically present for work and am still stuck commuting every day.

It's ridiculous that only 2 ISP options are commonly available in the Denver area.

Does anyone know about any better options short of hardwiring in a T1 line?  Southern metro area, Northern Douglas County.

We're in the eastern metro area. Comcast is really our only option and I pay for gigabit service. What helped was hardwiring devices if possible, plus I ran ethernet to the basement for my office. We were getting network drops with our wifi and I solved that be replacing our router. Originally we had a Netgear router but I swapped it out for a Ubiquiti Alien HD. It a pricey piece of hardware but so much better then any other router I've ever owned.

Are you using a modem/router rented through them or are you running off your own modem and router?

It's a rented one.  I'd consider buying my own, but it hasn't been an issue and I haven't really worried about it until my wife inadvertently became an unwilling CEO with 2 neurotic employees, constantly shouting, "Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" and all of them running wifi on 2 or 3 devices each.

of and Century Link, BTW.  We're supposedly at the highest bandwidth in our neighborhood, but the wife knows there is higher less than a mile away from us because her boss has been working from home too.

There are some things you can do, but the quickest / easiest / simplest is to turn off the unessential stuff.  Curtail the Disney+, Netflix, prime, etc use during business hours.

CL and Comcast are the two best-value options.  Mountain Broadband services some areas wirelessly (WISP).  HughesNet is always an option (Satellite).  VZW/Sprint/TMo/ATT/etc (LTE).  Any of those are going to be expensive vs. centurylink/comcast.  Expect 2-3sec latency with Hughesnet if that's got any traffic on it.... makes video calls/real-time stuff quite difficult.

Are you actually saturating your ISP, or is the problem on the LAN side, with your wifi/switching/etc capacity?
Remember that wifi is half-duplex, so only one device can be "talking" at once.  If you've got a couple smart-tv's pulling 4k video in, they're doing a lot of talking and not leaving much room for the rest of your devices to speak up.
What wifi channel(s) are you using - and where does that fall with regards to what your neighbors are using?  While your neighbors are on different SSIDs, the access points are all sharing the same RF spectrum.  When your neighbor's streaming 4k Pornhub for 3 hours a day, if you're both on the same RF channel that's all noise your devices are going to have to work through (lots of retransmits).
What up/down and ping times do you see now, and when your internet is "slow" during the day?  Test this cabled directly to the modem, not on wifi.

Wire what you can - especially high-bandwidth devices like tv's or pc's doing netflix, file transfers, big video calls, etc.  
Even just adding a 2nd/3rd wifi access point may help ease some of the RF congestion.

I cringe when ISP's (comcast especially, they're awful about this) keep trying to upsell their next service level or upgrade to some rental "GAMING ROUTER RGB 9000!!!!!@!!!1" when the problem has nothing to do with the wireline connection.  
People often laugh at me when I tell them I'm pulling over half a mile of data cable in my house, "Why don't you just use wifi lmao"... A good wifi network needs a good wired network to ride on.  
18 Gbps non-blocking throughput, 36 Gbps total capacity on the switch.  3 access points capable of 1.3 Gbps each.  Lowest-tier (100/7) that comcast offers.  I've got everything wired that I can.  I'm considering putting fiber in between my core switch and office router.  Neither my internet connection nor my wifi here has any issues.  I'm out in your neck of the woods as well.


T1.... The 90s called, they want their broadband back....

I had sloooooow DSL through Centurylink at my condo.  2 meg down, 1 meg up... any faster, and the line just wouldn't handle it; wouldn't hold sync.  Crappy old early-70s copper.
DSL, you're "guaranteed" that bandwidth - it can't be overprovisioned like cable can.  Downside is you're limited by loop length to the DSLAM/CO.  And unless you're getting into the bonded stuff, the link rates are rather low.
But that shit was rock solid - it *never* went down.  Typical phone company "five-nines" uptime.

Comcast has a lot of problems... seems to come and go.  About 2-3 months ago it'd go down for 20-60mins regularly through the day.  I couldn't go more than 2-3 days without losing internet sometime during working hours.  Looking at modem and router logs right now, the last event I have is mid-October when it went down/lost-internet, down for about half an hour there around midnight.  I haven't noticed it drop out lately either, correlating to the router and modem logs.
My coworker had issues on an overprovisioned node at his old condo... he'd see his WAN speeds drop to about 2/3 of what he was paying for during heavy-use times (late afternoon/evening).  
I haven't seen any of that here, both up and down are rock solid (124mb down, paying for 100; 6.1 up, probably paying for 6).  Latency between 11 and 15msec for every speedtest over the last week (every 8hrs).

Ubiquiti's got real good stuff.... been running full-stack Unifi for several years now, with a smattering of 'Tik equiment thrown in.  Microcenter carries that (ubnt) equipment.  More capable than your consumer-tier shit, at acceptable-for-home-use prices (not cisco/juniper/paloalto/etc cost, licensing fees, etc).  

If you are on centurylink DSL, I could very easily see how you'd saturate that line with a couple video calls and 4k streams happening simultaneously.  In fact, I'd bet that's where your problem is.

I'm waiting to see how the starlink thing pans out. They are doing beta testing right now. Not sure when it's supposed to be released yet

You could get in on the Starlink Beta Program

Just coming back to this, sorry I was out for a while and not checking up on things.  I was busy planning a protest at home while enjoying a meal involving a turkey!

I'd like to hardwire a bunch of devices, but that's going to be a little while before I can get started on that.  I don't like cables running all over the place and I don't have the patience or time right now to run everything behind the walls.  So for right now, I think I might be looking at buying a WiFi router that has the capability of connecting more devices.  I'm also going to check with CenturyLink to see if we can move the DSL jack that the modem hooks in to from the kitchen (it's one of those ones that fits over the phone jack and and splits the DSL and phone jacks), up to the loft where the homeoffice/school classroom are at.  I would think there should still be enough strength for the signal if it only moved upstairs, or is that wishful thinking? If it works, I could at least connect wifey's work laptop, the home laptop and a couple more devices directly to the modem.  The DSL hookup was originally put in the kitchen since that's the first jack coming off the lines from outside.

I'm hoping this will work for now.

It's kind of irritating that CenturyLink and Comcast are the only 2 options in a market like the Denver area.  I remember there were several smaller ones 10-15 years ago, but I guess they all got gobbled up by the monsters that are CL and CCast, or went under.

DSL? Lol, I found your problem. Are you posting from 1998?

Get cable or fiber gigabit service.

I have Xfinity 1 Gig and get 983 Mb/s down on a wired connection. Xfinity says I could upgrade to 2 Gig if that isn't fast enough...

I'm in parker and I I have Comcast.  

I pay for gig and get 1500mbps down

the best century link can do at my house is 7mbps down. Yep. 7.  

I don't have many issues, but I have a box in my yard.  

I have sent that there is a antenna type service that connects to a router, something like bluesky or something like that.

edit. Check that. Try aerus wireless as the antenna option.

....  I don't know if you know this but the vast majority of the land area in the US is lucky to get any sort of high speed internet at all.

If he lives in North Douglas County, Colorado he probably has access to literally any type of high speed internet he can imagine.

ETA: I live in the woods in the mountains and I can get 2 Gig.

I'm just east of Elizabeth. No cable of any kind in my development. Broadband or Satellite only. Check out the smaller broad band company's, they treat me good. Check the link below for coverage areas

          I use these guys

Dont forget about the local WISPs.

Centurylink is effectively just glorified DSL.  Or is there something I'm missing about that?

I would think that I would have all kinds of options too. But hell, if I know what they are...

Before the mass consolidation in the early and mid 2000's, there used to be tons of options, but they all disappeared, got bought out, etc.

What speeds are you looking for? I just noticed your location.

You in the Ponderosa East area by any chance?

East Highlands Ranch.  There's been a company running what looks like fiber lines for a good chunk of this year throughout the whole area, but I don't know who they are.  They're currently working on Quebec from the Kohls down to University.  

I don't know if it's necessarily the speeds, but more like one of the previous posters said that I might have too many wireless devices all trying to pull data at the same time.  My wife called Centurylink when she got fed up with the data freezing on her work computer and they told her we have to highest speed available for our area.  That's why I'm thinking about adding a router with more capability for multiple device access or moving the modem jack upstairs to the loft/home office so we can connect at least the laptops directly to the modem without a bunch of cables running all over the house or tearing up the drywall to run hard lines.

What speed tier to you pay centurylink for and what speeds do you get on a computer wired directly to the. Modem?

You are also correct in thinking your router could be part of the problem.

About the fiber... Go talk to one of the workers. They'll tell you whose fiber they are laying.