Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each direction at 500 meters, and there's no bandwidth contention with your neighbor. And VDSL2 is extremely mature, hardly the state of the art. By comparison, at the office I pay $450/month for dedicated 100Mb/s fiber service from Cogent. And the POTS infrastructure is just about as reliable--which is to say, very reliable.

I live in San Francisco, which is already extremely dense. AT&T owns the POTS system, but they refuse to put in the investment. My switching station is almost 2 miles away. I finally got fiber from Sonic.net. They're investing in hanging fiber over much of the westerner half of the city at a time when AT&T is hemming and hawing about upgrading their cabinets. And interestingly, my fiber service runs straight to that switching station 2 miles away.

The only reason cable dominates is because the phone companies aren't interested in competing. AT&T and Verizon own a huge amount of the POTS infrastructure, but are entirely focused on mobile and cable. It's a ridiculous state of affairs having so much infrastructure managed by the same oligopoly. When I cancelled Comcast and told them I was only paying $40/month for Gigabit fiber there was a long pause--he was absolutely incredulous. Was it a promo price, he asked. (No.) He knew there was no chance of retaining me as a customer.