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The telephone companies are the first to bear the brunt of this and have no way to respond.
Actually, they are responding. There's a whole series of ad on TV these days, from the telephone companies, to the effect that "we want to bring you the future, faster". They are blaming their inability to compete on antiquated laws.
I'm not well enough informed to say whether or not I agree with them. I will point out the the local companies were the last part of the telecom business to hang on to their legal monopoly status.
For years, the cable companies only carried information in one direction. That changed, and cable modems immediately began to be introduced. Maybe someone that knows more than I do about that aspect of the engineering can fill in the details.
Where did the legal monopoly status of telephone companies come from. Well, Alexander Graham Bell, and others, persuaded Congress that letting competing carriers set up switching centers, and string parallel wires to the same homes, would be "wasteful duplication", and that the competitive enterprise model for telephone service would not work. Instead, they went with the "public utility" model, like the electric power people did.
Eventually, the electric power people got to a point where competing providers can share the same grid, just the way competing truckers share the same roads.
As far as I'm concerned, the best thing that ever happened to me as a consumer is that two alternative carriers have both strung wires to my home. They each started to get better by leaps and bounds.
