Is location important for nodes?

Actually, it depends on what is protocol you have used.
If you use uplink CLI, the difference may be significant!
If you use S3, well, the result likely will be the same independently of your physical location, well, almost…
If you would use 64MiB chunks, then likely any connection will be faster (up to 5x), especially if you would use a parallelism and multiple threads, see Hotrodding Decentralized Storage.