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terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than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 $$$.