Lived in Germany for 5 years and cable internet was generally terrible. We had 200/20MBit. But the actual upstream would often be 1MBit. Downstream was better but at many times not great. There would also be regular outages, that would take hours to solve. The only alternative was VDSL with a maximum downstream of 50MBit.

We moved back to NL and have 1GBit fiber, and there has been a short outage once in three years. I know that there are a still a lot of addresses without fiber, but when I last checked the stats, about 50% of the addresses has the possibility to get a fiber subscription. Heck, even my parents who live in a small rural town have fiber.

Yeah the classic argument, but at some point every internet connection becomes a shared medium. It really depends on how the network is setup and where the fibre backhauls start. If the building has older wiring which can only support 1Gbps and you have a bunch of high bandwidth users, then yes it can affect your bandwidth more than using other technologies.

Interesting. In populous areas of the US they use HFC so the cable to your house only services a few buildings, with the neighborhood having a fiber optic back-haul that is shared, but much faster