Yes, unless you replace "regulation" with competition. Cable companies represent 46% of US broadband subscribers (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296239A1.pdf), and the rest of the "competition" in cable markets is at greatly reduced speed and availability, e.g., DSL, etc. Until we get real broadband competition, ISPs are going to continue to focus on cutting costs, e.g., traffic shaping and terminating service for heavy users, rather than investing in better infrastructure to support the increased demand that new applications, e.g., bittorrent, streaming HD video, etc.,create. (e.g. :-P)

We have had/do have similar issues and have not found a single solution. For windows host inventory, we're utilizing Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager (previously we were using System Management Server) For network device inventory (managed routers and switches) we take a two-fold approach: Rancid for configuration (and therefor inventory) and NeDi for network discovery and inventory. For IP address Management we tried a few apps (phpIP and IPPlan) but I found issues with both...so i wrote my own and we use it now: Collate:Network. I had written something similar to Collate:Network for hardware/software/user-assignment management called Collate:Inventory but it never caught on so it mostly sits idle now waiting for someone to ask me to get off my butt and start adding new features. To a certain extend I think this mish-mash of tools works well for us. Each tool is good at what it does (at least the ones I work with are...i don't really use the Microsoft tools personally) and so we usually get what we want out of them. The problem we run into is that there are so many tools to manage that they sometimes don't get the attention they need to stay up-to-date on our environment...though i don't know if a single monolithic tool is the answer either.