SvennoJ said:
It was an exception back than as well already. I lived in Uilenstede at the time, in Amstelveen on the border with Amsterdam. It's a student campus where I lived on the 12th floor with 14 others sharing the same kitchen. The room was 3x4 meters, with a hallway and your own bathroom.
Six of us got together to get ADSL internet in 1999 and install LAN network on our floor so we were sharing internet and playing games together in LAN. No wonder I didn't want to leave and so much better than dial up was lol. That dial up fiasco was actually in the last year I lived there. The old subscription was up, something went wrong in their system while getting a new subscription and KPN told me they couldn't 'fix' it for a year until their billing cycle had come around. Customer service in The Netherlands was (is?) a joke, getting to Canada was a revelation in that regards. So I switched back to dial-up for the last year (2001) I lived there.
Another reason to stay there was my love for movies at cinema volume. Living underneath the runway approach for Schiphol with other students that generally didn't complain about noise was the perfect excuse to crank the volume up. Twister with speakers meant for much bigger rooms on a 150 watt 7 channel amplifier was awesome!
The alternative was finding a place in Amsterdam where I got an offer to buy a loft for 450K Euros in Amsterdam Zuid or rent a small apartment for 800-900 Euros a month. So I just stuck it out in Uilenstede while saving up my money to buy a house in Canada. CAD 130K was what my first house cost us (about 94K Euros) and good thing I had saved up because I didn't have any credit score here yet so we had to pay 1/3rd up front as down payment to get a mortgage. Just under 35K Euros. Ah my first house, still looks pretty much the same (..)
I bought a house before getting a car lol. Coming from Amsterdam and living across from a supermarket, I just used my bike to get around. My wife (then engaged) borrowed her parent's car until we could comfortably afford our own car a few years later. I never liked debts so we paid the house of as fast as we could, using the max yearly extra payments we could do. (Mortgage is not tax deductable in Canada like it is in The Netherlands, which imo is why the house prices got so out of hand in The Netherlands)
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In hindsight 450k in Amsterdam Zuid might've been a good investment depending on things, but I get what you mean lol. And yeah customer service for those type of companies is still a joke. Nowadays if you call or write the biggest telecommunications operator here, called Ziggo, about some issue with tv or internet, their standard response is basically always that there must be something wrong with your cables. 
