If purchasing faster hardware at the consumer end won't fix the problem. Then isn't there someone else that needs to buy faster hardware? That's right, the telcos. And if I recall they were supposed to do that before 2000, and they still haven't.

I don't see how QoS even gets thrown into the discussion.
The problem isn't that 'Our resources on the network are scarce and we can't give you IPTV without giving our IPTV traffic priority through this bottleneck', it's 'We're still trying to send you high definition content over our aged network hardware. We don't want to upgrade to more modern technology because that requires reinvestment of funds. Who cares that the government subsidized billions of dollars just so we didn't take a financial blow for laying down newer, better lines, we get more money by telling you to pay more for higher priority in our queues on our slow networks, which are slow for no other reason than that we're profiting by not upgrading them.'