It's a wide-spread myth that the weather is cold in Siberia. I do live in Tyumen (West Siberia) and it's +32C here now. So, you cannot save on aircooling.
The two more myths are, that wild bears are all leaning around over here and one can drill oil right in his backyard.
There are no problems with BW, as for the past 8 years Transtelecom and Rostelecom -- both nationwide telcos, deployed a number of transcontinental fiber cables all along the TransSib (the rail-road connecting farthest east and west points of Russia). On both ends they are peering to EU and to Japan/China/Korea.
The average ping from Tyumen to my servers co-located in Mountain View is 180-200ms and the most part of it constitutes by european backbones.
200ms is very slow. I wouldn't put my business on anything slower than 100ms, I manage servers at three different US data centers and ping is within 50..70ms range for all of them, including cheap slicehost.
according to the article, building a data center in russia seems to make sense when optimizing for 1) flops per dollar of watt-hour 2) high absolute value of flops. for example, google may be interested in shifting their compute/flops intensive tasks (e.g. building search index) to the servers in russia and then replicating the index globally.
