internet speeds in Hungary are not so high. Look at east Romania what offers, you get 1GBps for 7 euro/mo.
I pay about $40 for 50Mb/15Mb and there is barely anything I can do to max this out.
What do you think would have more effect on the world: Increasing processing power 100-fold, or increasing desktop usage by 1% of the entire world population? How about 10-fold and 5%? I can guarantee you it's the former.
It's more true in case of Hungary where the minimum wage is around 250 EUR and people have a relatively luxury broadband speed, need (and addict) for car and historically good in pirating content since the world invented the VCR.
""" tl;dr Romanians love movies, we needed a way to download them and fiber was the answer. Much cheaper than copper, no risk of the cables getting stolen. """
As a person who helped build a "district ISP network" back in the early 2000s, I can tell you that that reason is just some Vice.com style linkbait.
Romania has great Internet speeds because the authorities tolerated us installing cables all over the darn place. Back then it wasn't uncommon to have almost half a dozen ISPs in a one square mile neighbourhood, all offering 50-100 mbps in the city and 1-2 mbps actual Internet speeds, without any FUP.
We were almost the same age and people didn't care about the low international speeds because we could all share movies and music at 50+ mbps (and 0.5 mbps was more than enough for browsing).
This was happening way before the video chat industry took off. Also, for that kind of stuff you need good sustained upload, but the ISPs are still limiting the upload speed to around 30 mbps even for gigabit connections. This doesn't affect BitTorrent (which can be left open over night).
Could be, it's just "believing" that the article isn't a whole lie.
Most EU money are invested into country's infrastructure, there were lots of debates whether it is wise, as infrastructure by itself does not boost production. I can just assume that Romania and many other East Europe countries did the same.. It is not cheap at all to fiber up whole conutry, but when you have "free" money to spend, it suddenly becomes an attractive laundering option.
In my opinion, saying that country X has fast internet because users desire is a wild guess and only. I am sure Americans love watching video and skype'ing too.
If you want to connect a home, then the expensive part is laying the cables. If you've put in copper already, then putting in fiber is expensive; but if you're putting in a cable now (or recently) then putting fiber instead of (or in addition to) copper is cheap.
4G coverage is not across the country, although not too bad, but its only one provider. Look at 4G coverage in Sweden.
EU money was used to fund RAIN and RAIN2 projects - connect the main cities and then rent out the lines to ISPs.
The (Swedish) monopolist ISP had reasonably smart CEO who realised that laying last mile in fiber costs same as laying it copper, but you'll lock-in your users for decades, no competition will ever be able to compete with that.
And the main reason of cheap fiber installation was fact that majority of people live in blocked houses, so population density is really high. Now look at households in US - massive houses, separated by massive land. One US house is probably equal to 20-30 Lithuanian families.