I was a network engineer at a large Tier 1 ISP, and let me tell you it is not all that great.
Europe as a whole has a fuck ton of congestion and reliability problems because ISPs don't want to build out fiber and these fiber companies are very slow to roll out and increase capacity, because they don't have an incentive to be fast or build fiber to the same places multiple times like in the US. If anyone remembers the Hetzner-DTAG fiasco you'll know what congestion I'm talking about where unless you are directly peering with someone on an internet exchange you can forget about having a good experience.
In Europe outside of the incumbent carriers, most ISPs build a local network and just peer at an exchange while buying the crappiest and slowest IP transit link they can get, meaning most Europeans reading this could just run a speed test to a network not directly connected to your ISP and see how bad their network speeds really are to most of the internet (you also probably don't have IPv6 either). Big ISPs also have zero incentive to peer with anyone because all of those small ISPs can usually only buy Transit from them (transport is out of the question for most small ISPs in most of the continent), unlike in the US where even Comcast has to appease their customers somewhat as there's a lot of competition these days from TMO and VZ.
In the US ISPs build their own transit and transport networks, meaning large ISPs have an incentive to build fast and reliable networks with lots of capacity and redundancy so they can sell access to said networks. This doesn't happen in places like Europe where there might be a single transport network for an entire geographic area. It also means that unless you are as big as Netflix, you can pretty much assume everyone in the lower 48 will have a good experience connecting to your server since congestion is only a hyper-local thing out here, but in Europe congestion is such a big problem the EU had to step in and ask American tech companies to voluntarily lower bandwidth usage so they could keep up.
That's also why you see so much shit from those same telecoms who cry about having to upgrade their network because of said big tech companies, when in reality it was those same telecoms who sat on their asses not building fiber and not upgrading capacity.
When the pandemic hit and ISPs realized they were resting on their laurels, a lot of fiber building companies were unable to handle the request for more capacity because every other ISP in Europe is asking for the same thing, and most ISPs can't build their own fiber as they never invested in their own equipment and training as, again, the government gave that job to someone else.
Europe as a whole has a fuck ton of congestion and reliability problems because ISPs don't want to build out fiber and these fiber companies are very slow to roll out and increase capacity, because they don't have an incentive to be fast or build fiber to the same places multiple times like in the US. If anyone remembers the Hetzner-DTAG fiasco you'll know what congestion I'm talking about where unless you are directly peering with someone on an internet exchange you can forget about having a good experience.
In Europe outside of the incumbent carriers, most ISPs build a local network and just peer at an exchange while buying the crappiest and slowest IP transit link they can get, meaning most Europeans reading this could just run a speed test to a network not directly connected to your ISP and see how bad their network speeds really are to most of the internet (you also probably don't have IPv6 either). Big ISPs also have zero incentive to peer with anyone because all of those small ISPs can usually only buy Transit from them (transport is out of the question for most small ISPs in most of the continent), unlike in the US where even Comcast has to appease their customers somewhat as there's a lot of competition these days from TMO and VZ.
In the US ISPs build their own transit and transport networks, meaning large ISPs have an incentive to build fast and reliable networks with lots of capacity and redundancy so they can sell access to said networks. This doesn't happen in places like Europe where there might be a single transport network for an entire geographic area. It also means that unless you are as big as Netflix, you can pretty much assume everyone in the lower 48 will have a good experience connecting to your server since congestion is only a hyper-local thing out here, but in Europe congestion is such a big problem the EU had to step in and ask American tech companies to voluntarily lower bandwidth usage so they could keep up.
That's also why you see so much shit from those same telecoms who cry about having to upgrade their network because of said big tech companies, when in reality it was those same telecoms who sat on their asses not building fiber and not upgrading capacity.
When the pandemic hit and ISPs realized they were resting on their laurels, a lot of fiber building companies were unable to handle the request for more capacity because every other ISP in Europe is asking for the same thing, and most ISPs can't build their own fiber as they never invested in their own equipment and training as, again, the government gave that job to someone else.