I would never imagine that happened in Europe. Free market works if there is competition, but monopolies either natural or artificial need regulations to prevent from abusing their powers.

Personal story: I live in SF Bay Area and got Comcast. Net was working really slow and got outages few times each week. To get any support I had to wait 40m to hear basic advice like restarting router.

Switched to smaller provider Sonic.net. Everything works, just once got some problem (in last 3 months). My call was immediately connected to competent human which diagnosed the problem in less than 3m. Next day they proactively call to improve one more thing.

Contenders usually got so much more will to do things right than monopolies.