I've had it say "maintenance" for a day before. And I live in the states. Also you'll frequently have an issue where it can't connect to a Netflix server for a week or so. Also they don't update their patches or updates for games. So its not like you get an old game and have to get the latest patch. The patches and updates stack on top of each other. So if they've updated a game 9 times. You have to download 9 updates. I did this with Uncharted 2. Each one was 90 - 200 mb. Which isn't always easy to download, and no matter your connection speed it's still kind of a pain. And when Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires released as a PSN exclusive that was over 7 gigs, we had a fun time downloading that. Considering it stalled out once, and threw an error after it was 90% complete. And PSN is apparently incapable of pausing a download to resume later when it hits a problem, and we had to start the download all over.

Fortunately I don't judge the system on its network capabilities. It has good games, good graphics, and it doesn't keep monkeying with its features and user-interface like some consoles on the market. So its easy to get comfortable with and easy to look past its short-comings, as long as you don't need a whole lot off of its network. So I'd suggest trying to get retail games until you get better internet. They do sell Journey as part of a package deal on disk :P