It's true that events such as the semiconductor fair can demonstrate real time interaction with a supercomputer, but deploying high bandwidth technologies remains expensive. The most aggressive cost cutter I know of (and the backbone's not what I know best) is Cogent, and although they could send many many colors down their fiber, they stopped at 2 or 4 because of the exponentially increasing cost of adding bandwidth.

As to copper technologies, these are not cheap either. In practice, the large ISPs are trying to sell slower tiers (such as 384 Kbps http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/81908) rather than trying to sell 50 Mbps (except for FiOS).

The WISPs and other little guys are doing good things, but the big companies change equipment as slowly as possible. The little companies then become test beds for untried equipment (the wireless broadband industry is a particularly good example of this).

I think that if false advertising and cross subsidies were eliminated, the smaller ISPs would be doing much much better as they already compete on free market principles.