It's not just lack of innovation. Sometimes there is innovation. It's the protection of monopolies. Comcast has been delivering me good speeds, but they're the only choice I have. That's what they want, it's the opposite of what I want.
It's not that Comcast (or whomever they're licensing technology from) isn't innovating; it's that the reason they're innovating is to avoid more expensive investments in new infrastructure.
Comcast and other major cable MSOs play a major role in the development of the DOCSIS spec. Over the next 18-24 months as DOCSIS 3.1 deployments kick up we're going to start seeing the most dramatic increase for residential broadband speeds since the late 1990s. Within about 5 years it's likely that the majority of people in this country will have access to 500Mbit-1Gbit/sec speeds via cable. It may not be as sexy or headline grabbing as FTTH build outs but it will have a much greater real world impact. It's more evolutionary in most ways than innovative but at this scale that's still quite an achievement. The same basic infrastructure that could deliver only 1.5Mbit/sec in 1997 will be able to deliver you 1Gbit/sec+ by 2017 and by 2025 10Gbit/sec will be quite common. Considering that this infrastructure is not very far removed from struggling to get a clear picture on your MTV in 1985 I think it's worthwhile to give the folks who work incredibly hard on this stuff some credit for their achievements.
The speeds they are providing me are much higher than they were. My point was that innovation isn't the important aspect of this issue, it's the protection of the monopoly. I think we'll all agree that monopolies will tend to innovate less.
The speeds may go higher, but they still are rarely what is advertised. Perhaps they should attempt utilization of advertised speeds, at this point, that would pretty much be innovation. In the U.S. at least.
