Cable always had that advantage, their infrastructure was ready-made for higher bandwidth. Their issue was market share. They were not nearly as consolidated a phone companies were (nor as monopolized as), and lacked the large reaching areas to allow them to expand. That has changed over the years and cable finally leads the way.
This was not the 'fault' of phone companies, you could make an argument that it was the government rules they operated under that led to this. The requirement to serve widely disperse customers led to long-range solutions, but with limited bandwidth. Cable providers had no such requirements; if you were out of their reach, that is the way it was. They could afford better cabling with the dense population they served (and the service they offered required it).