TL;DR: BitTorrent being the reason doesn't sound so interesting for a Vice article.
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).
According to http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/treg/broadband/BB_MDG_Romania_BBCOM... , there was only a broadband penetration rate of 5,5% . Perhaps some of the Vice article are lies, but probably not all of them.. As bittorrent doesn't generate as much money as the webcam industry...
Could be, it's just "believing" that the article isn't a whole lie.
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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.
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I can tell you for sure, why Lithuania has fibre and 4G across country.
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.
I'd attribute it to the lack of pre-entrenched cable TV service.
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.
No, it's cheap because it was designed that way. People were poor and the wild West like environment let us build cheap infrastructure using plain copper based Ethernet.
