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My memory is very hazy - too many beers in North London pubs far too many years ago to remember clearly :-0

And it was probably an E3 (Uk/Europe is E1/E3, US/JP is T1/T3)

E3 is ~34Mbps, so it probably wasn't. It's true that the E1/E2/E3 hierarchy is used outside the US, but links to the US can be either depending on carrier preference.

The T1/T2/T3 and E1/E2/E3 hierarchies join at the STM-1 level: An STM-1 can be subdivided as 4 x E3s or 3 x T3s.

This means that on a EU<->US SDH link, an STM-1 can be demuxed into either E3s or T3s, so you can have both standards on the same fiber.

In internetworking a Tier 1 carrier is a carrier that is so interconnected other parties pay to receive traffic from them.

T1 and Tier 1 are not the same thing.

That’s true. However at least in my memory back in the day people would call the 10 megabit directly connected university connections t1 lines, because of the tier 1 thing.