The competitive cable providers are not bad in Belgium from what I hear. There are other cable providers besides Telenet, and you can order a glassfiber connection from any provider that does business connections. That glassfiber is already in your street through Telenet with the red logo, which is the infrastructure company that was split off and which is controlled by the Flemish government, and which is by law required to let any ISP use the fiber infrastructure, just like Belgacom has to let everyone use their copper network. The price infrastructure providers can charge for the lease of their infratsructure, has now been capped also by the EU, so they can't kill competition on price with that in the future.
I actually have a Telenet connection in my Flanders office, and there is always something wrong with Telenet, either the connection drops during the off-site backup runs at night, or the bills are wrong (they always happen to overbill though lolz), or there is some other discussion where it's obvious that they are just "trying" to get extra money, but they're just not fair and correct.
Another really annoying thing with Telenet is that they cap all torrent traffic, and block a lot of torrent servers, like for instance, it's nearly impossible for me to download linux iso's using torrents (which is the preferred way to download linux distros because of the efficiency and the built-in hash check and extra data integrity safety) through the Telenet connection. Telenet is just horrible. Unfortunately, since my office there is in a business center that uses Telenet, I really can't change because I'm not allowed to install extra infrastructure. In my Brussels office though, I pay less for more bandwidth and better service, and my provider there, KPN, seems pretty correct, never had any issues with it, and when the lines were damaged once because a contractor doing road work had shorted the power supply to one of the nodes, which shut itself down and which is not even owned by KPN, they sent a crew over to do repairs before the infrastructure owner (I think it was Belgacom) even reacted to an email about that lolz.
To make a comparison: here in Germany, where my headquarter office is, I have a fiber connection from Telekom, and I had to actually pay full price to connect to a fiber node a couple of hundred meters out (cost several thousands!), even though there is a Telekom fiber node in the building my office is in, because it used to be a Telekom building... how absurd is that right? Imagine you want to start up a small internet business on a budget... the entire subsidies you get from the state to start up your business is consumed by the cost of connecting to the Internet...
It's always something with those ISP's, they seem adamant on imposing the most inefficient and onerous way to accomplish just about anything lolz...