The cable companies actively lobby to maintain things like local taxes and regulations on communication infrastructure (literally - you have to pay extra taxes to put cables up on the poles) because this creates an additional barrier to competition.
We don't currently have a telecommunications market. It has been sectioned off and divided up, and rolling out new ideas and services is basically illegal: you have to convince a ton of people in government of what you plan to do first. And so progress takes a lot more time than it would be if people were free in this respect.
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Disruption is coming, though. For example, gigabit fiber is a reality for me here in Seattle where population density is high. And satellites that sit relatively low in the sky above us promise to improve things _globally_! (This is very different from existing satellite internet services, which are very latent because the current satellites sit much higher up in the sky.)