That doesn't answer jitter, reliability, packet loss... There's lots of less than stellar ISPs doing 100Mbps fiber with 1+0 everything and no UPS on any of their nodes.
I did a brief search for the top ten Maltese ASNs, and there are not a lot of routes in and out of there, and not much submarine fiber. This is to be expected with any small island nation, however.
It is indeed a crapshoot. I'm lucky enough to work in network engineering in an area where I can contact the tier-3 support for most of the local last mile ISPs if something has gone seriously wrong. But there is immense variation in residential internet quality even within the same company and AS. Some parts of the Comcast network are rock solid, others are shit. Same for many adsl2+, vdsl2 and docsis3 operators.
The other problem is that one person's perception of shit internet is very different from another's. Less than 0.1% of ordinary internet customers know how to use tools like smokeping and test to their own wholly controlled iperf server on a 10GbE connection.
I did a brief search for the top ten Maltese ASNs, and there are not a lot of routes in and out of there, and not much submarine fiber. This is to be expected with any small island nation, however.