1) it costs a great deal less in salary to pay construction workers to install aerial or buried fiber in ukraine. Or to aim point to point microwave.
2) A network engineeering position that might cost a company $115,000/year in the US could be filled for $35,000/year in Ukraine.
3) Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment they use for core infrastructure. $1500 Mikrotiks in the same role where a US ISP would use a $15,000 Ciscos or Juniper. Building five to six nines uptime core router POPs with fully redundant -48VDC A and B power is not cheap.
> Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment
Well, unlike US ISPs, they try to compete on price and there is a lot of competition. They kind of have to be much more adventurous in terms of cutting down costs of network equipment. But they also compete on quality, so it has to satisfy that too or you are out.
Your shitty last mile DOCSIS3 connection over 20+ year old coaxial copper is not a reflection of the quality of an ISP backbone... I realize that from a customer perspective the two are indistinguishable, but if you look at the quality of the router/switch equipment used by the top 50 ASNs (ordered by CAIDA ASRank) for major north american ISPs, it's vastly more expensive than what's used in countries where ISPs don't have the budget luxuries for $100,000 routers.
What benefit is it to me :)? In all seriousness we run things in US and Ukraine and while in theory you would expect there would be some tangible differences given the concerns you outline in reality they are not there. Major backbone providers also use cisco and juniper gear and are about as reliable as stateside providers. Residential providers due to intense competition offer way better service at a small fraction of the cost.
2) A network engineeering position that might cost a company $115,000/year in the US could be filled for $35,000/year in Ukraine.
3) Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment they use for core infrastructure. $1500 Mikrotiks in the same role where a US ISP would use a $15,000 Ciscos or Juniper. Building five to six nines uptime core router POPs with fully redundant -48VDC A and B power is not cheap.