Can you have too many wireless things connected? Yes. Home routers are theoretically limited to around 250 (or so) online wireless connections. Many manufacturers impose more severe limits on the number of devices that can be attached due to overheating issues. The more devices you have connected at one time, the more heat is generated and heat and modern electronics are a bad combination. To extend the life of the router/gateway, the manufacturer/supplier will often impose a limit on the number of devices that can be connected. I've seen numbers as low as seven devices and as high as the twenties on restricted devices.
You can find stories of people using hundreds of devices on makeshift networks using unrestricted devices where the router becomes too hot to touch and in many cases burns out quickly. People hosting a big wedding, family reunion, or similar event in their home where they give everyone access to their wifi, will often find their router burning out quickly if there's unlimited access.
When you're using a "rental" gateway from a cable company, they'll typically impose a limit far below the 250+ possible connections so their gateway doesn't overheat and burn out too quickly. If you're renting it for $10 a month and you've got so many devices using it that you're burning out the $300 gateway every couple of months, it's a bad situation for the cable company. They don't want you giving out your wifi to all of your neighbors also.
In a typical four person household with each family member with a smartphone, a wireless printer or two, streaming devices, laptops, smart TV's, smart appliances, networked surveillance cameras, and more, you can pretty quickly get to the limit on the number of wireless devices allowed on that router. A lot of people don't realize that even when the device is turned off, it might still have connection to the wireless network to update itself in the background.
Before changing cable companies and dealing with whatever Early Termination Fee they impose, you'll want to check and be sure the other company's gateway/router isn't even more restricted. Getting that information may be like pulling teeth as it's not something the typical CSR has access to, and even their techs may not be sure, but you could go from a bad situaton to a worse one.
What are your options? You might be able plug a second router (likely one you'd have to buy on your own) into an ethernet port on the cable gateway to expand the total number of access points. That might work. You could also disconnect some devices from your network when you're not using them. (Just turning them off doesn't always disconnect them.) Under wifi settings you can typically force a disconnect which should then free up that port on the gateway/router for another device.
I've got two tablets, my smartphone, my Kindle Fire Stick, my Echo, my wireless printer, my Nintendo Wii and my Nintendo Wii U all on my wireless network with no trouble. I've also got my desktop, a thin client (mini-computer) and a blu-ray player connected by ethernet cables. And this is just me. In a multi-person house the number of connected devices would increase substantially. You're going to hear more and more people having this issue as more and more wireless devices proliferate, You're on the leading edge of what's going to be a very big problem in the very near future. Cable companies will be forced to expand the number of devices they allow to connect, but they'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do it. Every extra bit of heat they add to their gateway takes a little more life from it and they really don't want to shorten the life of their gateways.
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