[foobarqux]

It has nothing to do with regulation, it has to do with physics. Wireless is not nearly as good a communication channel as fiber or cable. Intuitively this is because of interference with other signals, reflections and obstructions, all of which are continuously changing.

[wtallis]

It's also due to the fact that there's only a few GHz of spectrum in which cheap equipment can broadcast a powerful enough signal to go any useful distance. WiFi operating in 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz are tricky but not impossible to use for anything longer-range than a single building. Much higher frequency, and you have to use pretty powerful transmitters and well-aimed highly directional antennas. Current tech allows for a few bits/s/Hz, so there's only a few gbit/s of bandwidth to be allocated between all long-range communication uses. If you want to offer gigabit speeds to households over wireless, you have to deploy a mesh network that's so dense it would be cheaper to just lay fiber.

[Retric]

You can use directional point to point links to give you basically unlimited bandwidth. The issue with cellphone bandwidth is simply the number of cell towers being kept to low. There are some limits on how close you can space towers but you could for example use one tower per city block.

PS: This is why you can have temperary cell towers for events. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_on_wheels