I mean, the regulatory capture is absolutely real. I don't mean to absolve cable carriers of their many sins, chief amongst them a decade or more of chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure which is part of why the battleship is so hard to turn today.
I just want to make it clear that there is no magic button that legacy cable carriers could press to suddenly have infrastructure that is fully capable of the latest DOCSIS standard. It is an expensive and time-consuming process that, from what I have seen, is indeed underway at many major providers.
At the same time, they are absolutely lobbying to minimize any regulatory pressure to improve. My personal belief is that increasing competition from LTE has been more of a factor in companies like Comcast suddenly investing in Node+0 than any regulatory activity. Pressure from the government to provide 100mbps upstream could be a huge boost in getting these companies to invest more in the project and get it done more quickly.
It's just, you know, there's no silver bullet here. And most emphatically, "fiber" is not that silver bullet. In most cases the only real advantage of fiber internet is that it puts the infrastructure under control of someone other than an incumbent telco or cable provider, who is more willing to play ball with the community. I can't help but feel, though, that this is a waste of resources when the same goals could be achieved, with less monetary investment, if the cable carriers were deprived of their lobbying operations and forced through franchise agreements or telecom regulation to provide a certain service level.
Put in the most extreme way, I think "roll out fiber" is in many ways a worse solution than "nationalize Comcast." It tries to force a technical solution to what is fundamentally a business problem - a business problem that does have some technical limitations as accomplices, but the way to overcome these is largely well understood.