German infrastructure has been neglected for several decades. In the past, the whole phone grid was nationalized under the Deutsche Telekom, which eventually got spun off into a regular company.

For some insane reason the government basically let them keep almost all of the existing telecommunications infrastructure, giving them a quasi monopoly for many years and the lobbying power to delay upgrading the grid to modern fibre connections in favor of squeezing marginal improvements out of the old copper wires.

Even today the upgrading is going slowly, but at least in cities the connections are reasonably fast, I have about 300 mbits in a fairly small town (about 200k people)