I believe my apartment has an exclusive internet contract

So my apartment manager tells me they only have At&t Ucrap and its terribly slow and laggy. I also noticed that the apartment is wired with coaxial ports in a couple different locations. Today I had a maintenance man over fixing various things and I asked him about these ports and he kinda-sorta told me they are there for satellite/cable but Comcast doesn't offer internet there because they have a contract with At&t. I say "kinda-sorta" because i'm not entirely sure he knew what he was talking about.

I'm telling you this because I THOUGHT it was illegal in the USA for apartment buildings to have exclusive contracts with a single cable company. I currently work from home making Android games and i'm going to have to move when my lease it up to a new place JUST because the internet sucks and I don't know what else to do.

My apartments are similar. I can get AT&T or COX cable, but we also have a local government fiber that is pretty good. I can't get the fiber because they have to run a new line to just my apartment, and they can't because it is private property. So really the only option is COX, which is ok because i get over 100Mbit.
Of course that is only after 6 months of me calling and bitching about terrible quality and saying their lines were messed up. Finally they sent someone out and low and behold the box outside the building with the coax breakout was rusting apart. Literally. Once that was fixed internet was heaven.

I have seen apartments (converted into condos) that had ancient coax cable (barely good enough for TV ) from Comcast and they said they could not get Xfinity Internet because of the old "noisy" cable and that the entire complex would have to upgrade their coax. I had three Comcast installers out to look at the wiring and they were all amazed to see the antique junction boxes down in the maintenance room and told me they would only upgrade if the complex paid they many thousands of dollars.  The client had no other option than DSL from Frontier.

The building I moved into is only a few years old. It appears to be wired for cable but i'm not sure what all is needed for it to work on Comcast's end. Ill probably contact them and try to get them out to check if the ports are live or not and go from there.

It may be the ISPs have an arrangement (everything west of 42nd street is our turf ... see... keep out or there will be trouble ... see)         sorry that was my best mobster speak

Well we have only a few internet providers in town too. I think years back, I think 2008. Clearwire came into town with wireless 3MB line, it was really fast until other people in your area get them. Soon it was down to 1.5Mb and they are off the Charter Communication (cable) backbone. The very company you're trying to escape from, well at least they don't raise rates. Kinda sucks living small towns, you're at the mercy of 80 bucks DSL or Charter who keeps raising rates.