Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively.
Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure.
It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol.
When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.
The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use.
And of course, you should not compare next gen access infrastructure with xDSL, as they are not mutually exclusive, and all countries have areas with degraded infrastructure on old technology, but also new infrastructure on new technology.
This is, again, completely unrelated to who makes the telco equipment.
Excuse me, but isn't this what you claimed in your original post? Quote: "If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment."
OP said: > > No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure > Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.
My intention was to note that the fact that German communication infrastructure is bad is not related at all to the manufacturer of ICT equipment, in the context of the quality of German (and European - in general) telco equipment manufacturers.
If Germany has bad infrastructure, and uses XYZ European ICT equipment manufacturer, this cannot be extrapolated to mean that XYZ is bad at making ICT equipment. The same applies to Huawei. The fact that some countries have good or bad infrastructure is not related to what equipment they use (at this point in time).
The end result being that quality of telco infrastructure is not an argument for or against any particular maker of equipment, because those two things are unrelated.
Any to underline why they are unrelated - simply because ISPs are profit-driven businesses and not tech playgrounds, so they will not invest in the latest and greatest equipment that XYZ/Huawei has to offer, instead they will milk the existing equipment and infrastructure dry and then switch to the cheapest new next-gen-access "thing" that exists for the next 20+ years. This does not mean that XYZ/Huawei doesn't have anything better to offer, it just means that the telcos do not want it.