What will it take to get decent internet?

Cox has an absolute monopoly in my area (Chesapeake, Virginia) on cable internet.  The next best thing is Verizon with DSL, and there's absolutely no fiber optic here, of course.

We've had Cox for several years, with absolute *constant* issues.  Scummy practices like giving us free upgrades that made our internet worse, I've watched our internet go from unlimited to capped at 1TB on the same payment plan, and absolutely terrible customer service.

The latest of my complaints is that due to how extremely turbulent the service in my area is from Cox, I had to upgrade to Gigabit internet.  I livestream and work from home, so I need solid internet 24/7.

Despite the upgrade, for months now, Cox will just drop off for hours at a time (upstream measured in Kbps), days at a time, whatever it wants.  There's no pattern, it's not a specific time of day, it's not a certain weather condition.  I had a technician come out and say that there was a problem at the pole, which is extremely vague and was not specified any further.

He said that there would be people coming to fix it in the coming days, no one came in my observation.

Their customer service is so absolutely terrible that every time my internet cuts out I'd rather suffer through it and get no work done until its over, rather than talk to them.  It takes literal hours to even get to the point in conversation where they send someone out.  Every time I initiate a new conversation they tell me to test my modem, test this, test that.  Everything has been tested. A dozen times.

Do I file an FCC complaint? Are there things that can be tested and done on my end that aren't super blatantly obvious?  I'm looking for a permanent solution to my terribly turbulent internet.

I noticed some of the people responding here seemed to actually know what they're talking about, as opposed to customer service.  Hope so.