The German Minister for Economic Affairs has stopped taking calls with foreign colleagues during car trips because he was too embarassed by the constant interruptions...
In contrast, both Scandinavia and many parts of Southern Europe have great mobile and landline Internet. I guess it has something to do with the structure of the market before EU enforced massive privatizations.
Eastern European countries mostly have great internet (especially landline, probably above average for mobile). I always assumed it must be because they came later to the party and went directly for modern technologies. As opposed to Germany who had telephone lines all over and then decided to get the most out of them because rebuilding with fiber would cost the companies too much.
The state-owned telcos were privatized in 90-ties, because the state is a bad owner, by ...state owned telcos from the west (Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica, etc). Of course, the first thing they tried was to move the obsolete equipment from their home countries to Eastern Europe for the price of a new one and for the money to get the new equipment in their home countries.
That didn't work out, because new competitors appeared, that built FTTH/Tripple Play networks from the scratch, with very low red tape at the time. That made the old DSL equipment not competetive in the cities (some even wanted to charge based on data transferred via DSLAM, making the flat-rate FTTH even better deal), so the ILECs had to do something with it - which meant to build their own FTTH network. DSLAMs were relegated to country side.
That's how Eastern Europe got fast and cheap fixed-line Internet in their cities. In the country, it is still mixed bag, better bet is LTE & 3G.
In Norway, they demanded the networks cover 97% of the geographic areas. It's why you might get 3G or even 4G in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain, wherever you might drive.
However, in the UK the inept politicians demanded 97% of the population, not geographically.
So all the UK networks just built perfect coverage for all the cities and towns, and could mostly ignore everywhere else.
Which means even in the populous South East England whenever I drive slightly outside my town towards one of the bigger cities 20-30 minutes away I can not have a conversation in my car as the connection is always lost. Nor on the train into London. And also must be a nightmare for the small villages that fall outside the 97%.
(On the plus side whenever we go to the country pubs around here, I can not be reached, and noone can look at the phone during dinner...)
Which is completely backwards. You don't need mobile where you live (as long as you can get a landline), you need it everywhere else.
You need expertise to allocate funds wisely however.