The claim that fixed internet in Ukraine is faster than in Europe is both true and a myth, depending on exactly what is being compared. If we take into account an average apartment in Kyiv with one in London or Berlin, the Ukrainian user often really does get better service. But the main point is that internet in Ukraine is far more resilient and ready for any challenge, including wartime ones. While Europe still relies on centralized, energy-dependent structures, Ukraine has built the most adaptive network in the world—one that continues to function during shelling and power outages.
Today, Ukraine is ahead of many EU countries in a critically important ratio: speed, quality and resilience relative to price. Ukrainian users can access speeds of 1,000 Mbps at a cost far lower than in most EU countries. It is precisely this combination of technological infrastructure, flexibility and reliability that creates a unique added value, making Ukrainian service globally competitive.
Comparing prices
According to research by Tarifica, there is a striking contrast between the cost of internet in Europe and Ukrainian realities. While Belgium and Austria struggle with high prices, Ukraine—thanks to the effect of a “late start” and the mass rollout of GPON—offers gigabit internet at a price many times lower than the European minimum.
A study of 12 European countries identified three types of market, each of which is revealing when compared with the Ukrainian model.
As we can see, the EU, too, has a highly varied landscape. Italy and France, for example, have arrived at much the same model as Ukraine: speed is no longer the main factor in pricing. In Ukraine, as in France, providers often offer gigabit internet at the price of a standard package in order to draw subscribers into their ecosystem.
Austria, by contrast, charges almost €100 for gigabit internet—10 to 20 times more than Ukrainian networks.
Compared with European market data, the Ukrainian user gets for €5 a service that costs €97 in Austria. This creates a unique situation: low business margins force Ukrainian providers to be as efficient as possible, and the result is the most resilient and cheapest network in Europe.
The “late start” ffect
The most important technical factor is that western Europe built its networks long ago, using copper telephone lines (ADSL). For it, modernizing such networks is now too expensive and too slow.
While western Europe is trying to wring the last bit of life out of copper cables through technologies such as G.fast or Vectoring, Ukraine is building the future on pure glass. Since Ukrainian operators began mass internet construction later, many of them skipped the copper stage altogether and went straight to laying fiber.
As a result, Ukraine has almost no legacy burden of old systems—apart from the Ukrtelecom network—that has to be maintained. Ethernet and FTTH (fiber to every home) and now xPON, have therefore become the default standard. According to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the share of users of this technology rose to 53 percent in 2025. After the start of constant power outages, the number of applications for connection almost doubled.
Particular attention today is being paid to xPON (Passive Optical Network), a modern passive optical-network technology that delivers internet via fiber-optic cable without the use of intermediate active equipment between provider and consumer.
In addition, unlike many EU countries where the market is divided among two or three telecom giants, such as Deutsche Telekom in Germany, Ukraine has thousands of registered providers. This has a powerful effect on price. To survive, small local providers kept prices at a minimum for years while constantly increasing speed.
It was during the war that gigabit internet in Ukraine ceased to be a premium service. Providers are now switching subscribers en masse to 1 Gbps simply in order to remain competitive.
Another important factor was pressure from the Ministry of Digital Transformation to use modern optical technologies that, in addition to speed, would make it possible to keep services running for up to 72 hours during blackouts.
Kyivstar, for example, had previously focused on building fixed networks using FTTH technology, but outages exposed a problem with batteries for in-building equipment. The longer it went on, the less they worked, and they did not have time to recharge. In the end, the operator also began developing xPON.
At the same time, over the last four years Vodafone’s investments in building and strengthening the resilience of its home internet network have exceeded UAH 1.5 billion. This includes both the large-scale rollout of new infrastructure and modernization from earlier technologies.
“We have built a GPON network that already covers more than 1.9 million households, and as of today 95 percent of subscribers already have access to services based on GPON/GEPON technology. We have also completed testing of XG-PON (10-Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network), and our network is fully ready to provide customers with data-transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps,” the company’s press service said.
City layout and housing density
Another factor shaping the development of high-speed internet is the structure of Ukrainian cities, which consist predominantly of high-rise apartment blocks. For a provider, connecting a single building with 200 flats is far more profitable and far faster than pulling cable to 200 separate cottages in a European suburb. That allows Ukrainian operators to recoup their investments more quickly and reinvest them in new equipment.
That does not mean, however, that the same local providers are not also rolling out networks in suburbs, settlements and villages. Here, too, initiatives from the Ministry of Digital Transformation played a role, above all co-financing programs under which the state helped small providers extend fiber to the most remote villages, where doing so had previously been economically unviable.
“During the full-scale war, Ukrtelecom, including in frontline settlements, laid around 20,000 km of fiber-optic cable, of which 4,500 km came in 2025. The total length of its optical network has reached almost 93,000 km. Optical internet services are available not only in regional centers and large cities, but also in more than two thousand smaller towns, villages, and settlements,” the company’s press service told in a comment for ZN.UA.
Energy independence and xPON
War and blackouts forced Ukrainian providers to do the impossible: upgrade their networks to the xPON standard—energy-independent fiber. In 2025, this became a strategic priority. It not only makes internet stable when the power is out, but also technically makes it easy to scale speeds to 2.5 Gbps or even 10 Gbps in the future.
This applies to villages too, where power grids are often even more vulnerable than in cities. xPON makes it possible to stay connected for up to 72 hours during power cuts, provided the user has a power bank and the provider’s node is equipped with batteries.
As of today, the average price range for gigabit internet (1,000 Mbps) in Ukraine’s large cities is between UAH 250 and UAH 450 per month.
The backbone gap
For all the success of the last mile and the connection of individual buildings, it is important to understand the fundamental foundations on which the global network rests. Western Europe retains a significant advantage in two strategic areas.
The first is the power of Tier 1 backbone routes. European data centers are linked to one another by giant “information autobahns” with capacities measured in hundreds of terabits. Such infrastructure guarantees stability during peak loads at the scale of entire countries. Ukraine, while actively expanding its own channels, still depends to a significant extent on transit through major European hubs in Frankfurt or Warsaw. That is also because those same European data centers host not only government servers, but also the servers of Ukrainian banks and large Ukrainian companies, which has contributed to security during the war.
The second important factor is the civilized coverage of the hinterland. Across the EU, large-scale state programs are in place. These mechanisms guarantee that even in the most remote mountain village there will be stable—albeit much more expensive—connectivity laid down to a single national standard.Начало формыКонец формы