A similarly curious case is Moldova, Romania's neighbour.<p>I grew up there, I remember dial up and wasting a lot of my mother's money on it. Then the state run ISP rolled out ADSL and it got way better. In the span of 2-3 years, I went from 64/64 kbit/s to 6/1 Mbps.<p>In another year, it was 24/1 Mbps, and yet another year or so they started rolling out fiber, with free upgrades for everyone as long as you renewed the contract. 30/30 Mbps, then 100/100 Mbps, now you can get 1000/1000 for $20 or 300/300 Mbps for $10. Upgrading to a higher speed is still free afaik, but your contract gets renewed for 3 years.<p>Interestingly, it used to be possible to get multiple connections at the same house (like, literally, multiple fiber cables). Not sure if that's still possible and what the limit was per individual/house, but I always wondered if one could get something ridiculous like 4000/4000 Mbps aggregate speed.<p>And yes, the upload speeds are true, although their own routers won't reach them.<p>But good news, you can use any router with an SFP transceiver.<p>I am not aware of anything like the private networks created in Romania by individuals. There are a few other ISPs that started early, and technically competed with Moldtelecom (the state run ISP) with their own cables, but they did not operate outside the capital for a very long time. Moldtelecom had a monopoly.<p>There used to be a lot of Internet cafes that everyone would use for LAN gaming and Internet browsing, it was fun.<p>This might be the best thing the government has done in the country since independence, I don't know what motivations they had, they didn't seem to be lobbied by anyone since there were no Internet startups with significant influence. They just sort of... did it.<p>If anyone knows more about the history of Internet in the Republic of Moldova, please comment.<p>Now there's talks of selling Moldtelecom to Huawei, which might be a bad idea. They already use Huawei equipment, just not sure what they would do if they buy the whole company.