Romania has 2 major ISP's, one that has always been very innovative, forward-thinking, has kept prices as low as possible (100 Mbps, unlimited data, for $13 a month, in pretty much any urban area in the country, and even some rural ones), and the other who used to be the landline/dial-up monopoly, but right now are playing catch-up to the other one a bit, but still doing pretty well.
We're still waiting for carriers to start adopting LTE in Europe, though, and it probably won't happen until 2014 or so. Hopefully, they'll jump straight to LTE Advanced by then.
I'm living in Romania now and can confirm this. My friends in Germany can only dream about such uplinks. Internetwise, Germany feels like a Second World Country for me now. The rds founder seems like a very smart man. I never met him but I like him already :)
Let's see if Cluj can continue to build and hold the startup scene there.
I second that. I'm going from Germany every August to Romania and it feels like going to Internet Worderland.
Cabletv + 100mbs unlimited for 8 euros, prepaid 3G cards with 5000mins+internet a 5euros, lots of free wireless. Not to mention the cool operator Zapp ( based on EVDO ), had 2Mbps in on a isolated mountain summit!
Meanwhile in Germany pretty much is a hindrance, beginning with DSL ( i hate the uplink ). Not to mention that Vodafone Germany is billing 3g internet like is made of gold.
We're still waiting for carriers to start adopting LTE in Europe, though, and it probably won't happen until 2014 or so. Hopefully, they'll jump straight to LTE Advanced by then.