“Relatively” may have needed some emphasis here, but in general, networking done by mostly the same boxes operated by the same people, in the same climate controlled building, are going to be far more reliable than home networks, ISPs running across countries, regional phone networks, etc.

Obviously nothing is perfect, but applications deploying in data centres should probably make the trade offs that give better performance on “perfect” networks, at the cost of poorer performance on bad networks. Those deploying on mobile devices or in home networks may better suit the opposite trade offs.