You forget about two others. Telecommunications companies and law. They make the problems worse exponentially fast when they are at an imbalance. When Comcast has a 20 year monopoly on maintaining your area's infrastructure, you can see real fucking quick where that will lead up to. People bitched about 1 Gigabit internet years back, the majority didn't know that they already provided those bandwidths for business use along with redundant channels in case one goes down for YEARS. They cost a fuckload a month but that traffic is traveling down the same cables your telephone traffic goes through. The main infrastructure can handle it, the Residential Exchanges however can NOT. That's where they spend the lowest dollar on because the general public is not a high stakes customer like mid to large companies are. I'd say this is understandable but remember the infrastructure is subsidized by the US Government and their oversight on "Advancing and maintaining the infrastructure" is almost fucking non-existent due to the FCC being willingly blind. This is primarily the reason why AT&T of today is so fucking massive. They didn't get that way through small private expansion, they got that way due to subsidies, lucrative tax breaks, and nearly unlimited credit. If AT&T were about to die tomorrow the US Gov would write them the biggest damn check since GM's bailout, no questions asked. It's a huge gun to the head of politicians when denying them a bailout would result in thousands of layoffs and the political weapons that would result. We fix this monopolistic shit, then we can deal with shitty programming.