I should mention that I am a server tech and know a lot about networks. I really hate the service I have now, and the company that I really wanted to use doesn’t service my town. How can I build my own internet connection? I know this is possible, because the college I went to was its own ISP.
Enlist a bunch of neighbors and do what this article describes.
An Internet connection consists of two parts: a link (like a telephone wire, or coax for cable, or a fiber optic cable, or two dish antennas on towers pointing at each other), and something at the other end of the link. You might be able to DIY the link. Big providers have economies of scale, but sometimes people in rural areas set up point-to-point microwave links, or actually get the permits to attach fiber optic cable to the utility poles themselves if they think the quote from their local telco is completely ridiculous, and buy the cable on eBay and rent a cherry picker and stuff.
You fundamentally can’t DIY the other end of the link, since that’s what makes it the Internet. You have to find someone whose router is already part of the Internet, and either (a) pay them to let you connect, or (b) convince them to let you connect for free.
Option (a) is an ISP. For the most part, even ISPs have ISPs. Your university probably paid for one or more high-speed links to the Internet, maybe from the same companies that offer residential and small-business Internet service, maybe from less-known specialists. You might like one of the latter better, but their minimum commitments are probably too expensive, unless you can find a way to share the connection among your friends and neighbors (viz. Orca Island).
If every ISP paid an upstream ISP, then it would be “turtles all the way up”; so there must be someone who doesn’t pay for IP transit. Those are the “tier 1” providers, who are big enough that it’s useful for them to exchange traffic with each other, and equal enough in size that it’s not clear who should pay whom. Even very large ISPs (e.g., Comcast) sometimes pay for IP transit. Conversely, smaller ISPs that mostly pay for their IP transit may still peer for free among themselves when possible, like ISPs in a small country that peer intranationally but pay for external transit. ISPs may also provide IP transit for free to services very popular among their customers (e.g., YouTube). In any case, no one’s going to peer with you in particular for free.
So I think your options are: (a) to find a distant ISP that you like better, and figure out some way to DIY the link, or (b) to buy an expensive connection, and try to resell it to your neighbors, or © to stick with whatever you’ve got. Telecoms tend to be natural monopolies, so you’re probably stuck.
Or pigeons. Yes, seriously, there is an official protocol for transferring Internet data via messenger pigeon. Wholly impractical, of course (there’s a reason it was published just after the end of March), but it’s still consistent with the Internet’s design as a whole.
That would be IETF RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, which includes the wonderful:
ETA: Forgot this gem:
RFC 2549 cites (and contains a link to) an earlier version, RFC 1149, that is also worth a read.
One can also link computers in a LAN with a chain of paper clips. It’s been done.
Obligatory On-Topic: I’ll agree with the other posters and say that the Internet is, to a simplified first approximation, a collection of ASes (Autonomous Systems) which all route packets among each other, as guided by some exterior gateway protocol such as BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). An AS is a network which can route packets within itself without any external help (hence the ‘autonomous’ part); you can think of it as a little fiefdom with its own rules and connections to other, similarly-independent fiefdoms. Data is transferred via a series of handoffs from fiefdom to fiefdom; the big technical advance embodied in the Internet is that this series of handoffs is completely transparent to the people and systems at both ends of the connection, because of data encapsulation and automated routing algorithms.
Becoming your own AS means looking for other ASes close by (in physical and networking terms) willing to exchange BGP data with you, which is called peering. That gets you into the contractual terms of peering (settlement-free or otherwise) mentioned by TommySeven.
It’s immediately comparable to cargo containerization: Goods can be transshipped from ships to planes to trains to trucks much more efficiently if they’re kept in standard-sized containers which can be moved without having to be opened, as compared to the older system, where break bulk cargo was moved in a very labor-intensive by stevedores from ship to shore and then handled in similarly ad hoc ways from there.