I live in NA and decided to make an EU character for the day and i've been playing for a couple hours and haven't had a single pokeball or disconnect. Playing on my home world, Jenova, I pokeball every 30 seconds and DC atleast once every hour or two.
Depending on where you are, routing across land can be worse than a quick ocean trip.
Especially in north america, a place not known for a good internet infrastructure.
Adding to what Canadane wrote, the NA servers are located on the west coast in California. If you live on the east side of NA then it's not unreasonable to find your connection to the EU servers being better.