It's not only the average/median that's bad, it's the lower percentiles that are the most embarrassing. My parents live in a central, fairly dense neighborhood of a town of 40k people. Their only option until 2017 (!!!) was 64k dialup or very flaky 3G. It wasn't only their street that was affected, but the whole part of town, including a newly developed (but mostly empty, what a surprise) business park built from EU development grants. In my mind the reason for disasters like this is a mixture of
1. De facto monopoly of the state-owned telecom provider suffering from mind boggling not-invented here syndrome. They've been pushing their proprietary custom-built hardware and protocols for decades while the world largely moved to china-built commodity which is orders of magnitude cheaper.
2. Political resistance against declaring broadband as an essential utility. There was a parliamentary vote in 2011 to declare a right for households/businesses to get broadband connections (as is the case for electricity/sewers/telephone). It was declined with votes of the conservative/liberal coalition at the time. Nobody even talks about this anymore, other culture war topics seem more important nowadays. Whether to allow wolves to be hunted seems like a more important topic in the national debates.
3. In general there seems to be an unfortunate climate of hostility against technology that reminds me of the Luddites. Smart phones and laptops are banned in high schools, etc. People mostly focus on the dangers and downsides of technology vs the benefits.
Source: Born in Germany, I moved to California a few years ago and can see the difference.