Agreed - State College internet is dismally slow and unreliable for a town of ~60,000 college students, grads, and employees.
Does the College itself get a government/academic feed or do academic institutions have to rely on local commercial providers?
UK has janet and UKERNA.
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/network
To overcome the limitations of our domestic ADSL (6 km from exchange over solid aluminium wire voice circuit) I sometimes run queries over an RDP session to my College PC.