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Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass
- tekklloneer 10y agoWhile I worry about large carriers absorbing small ones, this could be an excellent big step in real competition for bay area internet access.
- cardigan 10y agoSo will Webpass be faster now?
- boulos 10y agoMy webpass is already 1 Gbps symmetric. If yours is less, it's a per-building upgrade (so maybe with additional capital they'd do that in more places) and may not be feasible. Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on Fiber).
- bobbles 10y agoComing from australia and not familiar at all with Webpass... is the latency low? ie. could people use this for gaming internet connections?
- djcapelis 10y agoYes. It's point to point wireless to a building and Ethernet from there. No real latency issue there.
- r1ch 10y agoCurious what they're using for backhaul wireless links if they're offering 1 gbps service. Not many solutions can handle that kind of speed.
- rayiner 10y agoLooks like millimeter wave: https://webpass.net/about_network https://webpass.net/about_network.
- jauer 10y agoRight now you can get away with a lot of "oversubscription" in MDU situations when you have 1-2Gbps to the building (typical millimeter-wave radio speeds). I wouldn't be surprised if they have buildings fed with 1x1Gbps going to 40x1Gbps clients. (hand waving about Erlangs and queuing theory here) E.g. if you assume everyone is downloading a DVD image from a fast mirror (CentOS install DVD or something), they probably won't all start the download at the same time so there's a really good chance one user will finish their download before someone else starts theirs. My MDU users rarely crack 1Mbps on a 30-day 95th percentile basis.
- gkop 10y agoAre you preparing for popular streaming video products pushing 4K content?
- jauer 10y agoA popular model is to use wireless until enough you have enough customers in a building to justify building out fiber so you can supply more bandwidth. Even without fiber you could have a 50 unit building with half the units streaming 4K@30Mbps simultaneously and have enough bandwidth left over for typical web use.
- curun1r 10y agoFormer Webpass customer here. I never used it for gaming, but the highest latency I ever got from SpeedTest with an SF server was 8ms and it was usually 3-4. My building was on the 100mbps plan and the actuals were ~90mbps down, ~65mbps up. I'd hope that connection would be good enough for gaming.
- kbar13 10y agoafter like 100kbps speed does not matter for gaming. you need a good quality connection (stable latency + no packet loss)
- boulos 10y agoI've got about 15ms to google.com (and the silly speedtest.net page reports 4ms for whatever they chose nearby).
- jeff18 10y agoThe latency to the West Coast Battle.net server is a very steady 12ms according to the Starcraft in-game UI.
- walrus01 10y agoBased on what I know of Webpass' network architecture, I'd be very surprised if latency was >5ms average from any of their individual on-net buildings back to any of the major IX points where they have routers in the SF Bay area.
- pbarnes_1 10y agoAs someone who used to live in Sydney and now in SF with Webpass... I can tell you that Webpass would be what a proper NBN rollout would look like. It's kind of amazing. It only costs $60/month and you just get an ethernet drop. No login, no metering, no shaping. Example latency: admin@RT-AC5300-E6A0:/tmp/home/root# ping -c 5 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=0 ttl=55 time=3.526 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=1 ttl=55 time=3.559 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=2 ttl=55 time=3.547 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=3 ttl=55 time=3.518 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=4 ttl=55 time=3.584 ms --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 3.518/3.546/3.584 ms
- rosege 10y agoSomeone will probably roll something like this out in the metro areas and it will eat the NBN
- pbarnes_1 10y agoWebpass only serves multiple dwelling units AFAIK. You can already order microwave and fixed fiber links in Sydney CBD, Pyrmont, etc but they cost a lot more than $60/m. The NBN was a solid idea. Execution is always kind of the issue though.
- tacticus 10y ago> was :( such a sad truth.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoI doubt it. I'm no expert, but isn't it illegal to provide non-NBN internet to any house that has NBN? I recall someone complaining that they had no internet at all for months, because the NBN wire got hooked up to their house, but not plugged into anything at the other end - then their internet company was legally obliged to disconnect their DSL because technically they had an NBN cable - it just wasn't plugged in to anything. Of course this would be a good law IF we were getting proper fibre NBN (and the above technicality got seen to). Just like we don't want multiple companies running power lines to one house.
- teen 10y agoWeird, I had Webpass for a year and was using it for a ton of gaming, and had no idea it was using wireless. It was really consistent and fast.
- firloop 10y agoI live in SF and have the 100mbps Webpass. Over my wifi, I get pings of <5ms to AWS us-west-1.
- pbarnes_1 10y agoIt's more the interconnection with the rest of the Internet than the building uplink... :) My building is on 500mbit Webpass and things get pretty dire at peak times.
- asah 10y agome too: Argenta.
- gkop 10y agoWebpass has only been doing fiber for 10 months [0], as far as I know the bulk of their customers in SF are on fixed wireless. I'm discouraged by this announcement - now it seems there's zero chance of widespread Google Fiber in SF. [0] https://webpass.net/blog/fiber-is-here https://webpass.net/blog/fiber-is-here
- jerryr 10y agoI'm surprised by your downvotes. While "zero chance" might be a bit dramatic, it seems like this warrants discussion. Does this mean that Google thinks P2P wireless is the way to cover urban areas? Will it disincentivize them from persevering through a city-wide fiber installation because P2P wireless is "good enough"? Or is it a good opening play for fiber in SF because Webpass was already navigating the zoning/regulation/rights and just needed capital to succeed? I'd be very interested to hear others' perspectives on this. Disclosure edit: I'm a current Webpass P2P wireless customer. I was literally about to switch away from Webpass to another P2P wireless solution (we have a site evaluation next Monday) because Webpass has been unreliable for us lately. I'm really curious what, if anything, this means for Webpass and Google Fiber in SF.
- rayiner 10y agoI don't really get this phobia of fixed wireless. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds--while the technology for digging up city streets isn't.
- pdx6 10y agoThe city hasn't been doing a great job of dropping in fiber either. Maybe in SoMA, but up here in the hills I had my street repaved and there was no plans to put in fiber or upgrade sewer while it was being dug up (I checked with DPW). Fixed wireless is the future in SF, even with SF's dig once policy (http://sfgov.org/dt/dig-once http://sfgov.org/dt/dig-once).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kevenwang0531 10y agoHopefully this will speed up Fiber's rollout in San Francisco. I remember Google's announcement regarding Fiber in SF a few months back. This acquisition is a no-brainer for both companies!
- jordanthoms 10y agoWow, unexpected. I used Webpass when I was in SF and was very happy with the quality of their service, so them getting more capital to expand is a great development.
- jaytaylor 10y agoYep, WebPass was by far and away the best ISP I've ever had. They actually emailed me in advance about planned service interruptions! Wow!!!
- aquilaFiera 10y agoIf you listen, you can hear the sound San Francisco rental managers rejoicing they can advertise they have Google Fiber.
- xeno42 10y agoInteresting.. I've been very happy with Webpass for the past 8 or 9 years (though my building's crappy wiring can "only" support 100Mbit). A Webpass engineer I spoke to last week mentioned they're rolling out fiber to the building to provide redundancy for the wireless mesh. Surprised me as I could count on my fingers the number of outages webpass has had since I started using them. Perhaps it'll replace the wireless portion in the longer term.
- walrus01 10y agoIt might look like a mesh on a topology diagram but believe me, it has nothing in common with wireless "mesh" networking... I don't have insight into the exact configuration of webpass' routers but they're undoubtedly using fairly ordinary BGP and OSPF between nodes. The wireless links are exclusively high capacity point-to-point trunks.
- dsl 10y agoIt is not "mesh wireless" gear, but it is a mesh at the routing layer (ECMP). My old building had PtP wireless to multiple other buildings. Edit: I always speculated the difference between 100Mbps and 200Mbps on-net buildings was if that particular location was multihomed.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jboydyhacker 10y agoI have webpass with 1gb for 550 a year. I've had it for 7 years or so. The bummer is- it's actually cheaper than Google charges in other cities- hopefully the price does not go up.
- spikels 10y agoWebpass does not serve houses or smaller and/or older apartment buildings. This substantially lowers their install costs per customer relative to business models, like Fiber, that serve almost everyone n an area.
- rayiner 10y agoIt's a brilliant business model: expand slowly based on demand only to dwelling units dense enough to be economically viable.
- techsupporter 10y agoIt definitely is and a bunch of small companies are doing an amazing job of it (Seattle has three such companies, for example). It is also one big reason why I really want municipal fiber. There are a lot more "houses or smaller and/or older apartment buildings" than there are new condo or high-end apartment buildings. It would be nice to have some competition in those dwellings alongside the cable company, usually with caps, and (maybe) the telephone company, usually DSL with very slow speeds.
- rayiner 10y agoMunicipal fiber wouldn't be "competition" in any meaningful sense of the term. The Chatanooga rollout cost about $5,000 per subscriber and was heavily supported by cross-subsidies from electricity ratepayers. I'd support municipal fiber as a complete government monopoly in places that have shown themselves capable of operating public infrastructure (e.g. NYC). But billing it as "competition" is disingenuous. You can't meaningfully "compete" with an entity that gets non-market revenue.
- codemac 10y agoGod, I hope the support doesn't end up like most other Google product's support. I have webpass and my heart dropped. My project fi experience has been bad enough already.
- malandrew 10y agoWhile the support will almost certainly get worse, the good news is that Google some of the most rigorous SRE practices in the world.
- jrockway 10y agoI work on Google Fiber. We have pretty good customer support; call us 24/7, someone in the US will help you with pretty much anything you want that's Fiber-related (WiFi too slow? TV remote not working? That sort of thing.)
- mholt 10y agoYeah we have you in Provo. Awesome service!
- curiouscats 10y agoI just hope the commitment to good service that Google Fiber has started with isn't trashed by foolish executives. The state of customer dis-service in the USA is so strong that it seems pretty likely any company that has good service for awhile will shift resources into bigger paychecks for executives and fewer resources for customer support. I hope Google Fiber avoids this situation. Some companies do but not very many: Trader Joe's, Costco...
- jrockway 10y agoI think good customer service is pretty much essential to running a service like Fiber, because there is no code that I can write that's going to smooth over the fact that we killed your lawn while running the fiber through your yard. It happens :/
- EwanG 10y ago
- BWStearns 10y agoI'm pumped. I live in a Webpass market so hopefully Comcast starts doing their damn job now that it's a Google market.
- slg 10y agoI was a happy Webpass customer for about 3 years before moving to an area not served by them. I would be curious to see if they are folded into Fiber or if they are kept as a separate brand. As it currently stands Webpass has much stricter limits on who they are willing to serve. Last time I checked they required that all customers lived in multi unit buildings that were built within the last 20 years. I imagine this was meant to keep their installation costs low while hopefully benefiting from economies of scale. That makes sense for a new niche ISP, but Google has the resources and motivation to abandon those restrictions.
- gkop 10y agoHas Google Fiber sold fixed wireless under the Fiber brand before? I think they would have to keep a separate brand at least until they can get all of the many Webpass fixed wireless subscribers switched over to fiber.
- shadykiller 10y agoI use Webpass. Get 600mbps on my wifi AC router. It's amazing and I'm super happy with it. Hoping with google fiber speed gets even faster.
- sanjeetsuhag 10y agoHow much are you paying ?
- cpach 10y agoCool! What router/access point is that?
- nurblieh 10y agoHuge fan of Webpass. 1 Gbps of IPv4/6 with great customer service for $55 a month. It can't be beat, if it's available to you. I hope this is a win for the Webpass employees, in the short and long term. Thanks for all the bits!
- vecinu 10y ago$60/month now but I agree with all your points.
- baddox 10y agoMy only complaint is that for home service there is no way to get a public IP address, so you've got to get an external server if you want to access your home computers from elsewhere on the Internet.
- lokedhs 10y agoEarlier in this thread, it was mentioned they are offering IPv6. I'd expect those addresses to be public at least?
- baddox 10y agoI wasn't aware of that. I'll have to look into it.
- anxman 10y agoInternal IPv6 addresses are publicly addressable on Webpass but you may have to enable it on your router. If you have terminal access to your router and it supports iptables, you can manually enable forwarding for a specific port like this: ip6tables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5005 -j ACCEPT ip6tables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5005 -j ACCEPT ip6tables -I FORWARD -p tcp --dport 5005 -j ACCEPT ip6tables -I FORWARD -p tcp --dport 5005 -j ACCEPT ip6tables -I FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT Note that if you're using this for Api callbacks like AWS Lamda, they do not support IPv6 and then your best bet is a VPN tunneled to your local device. Good luck!
- TheMagicHorsey 10y agoI'm a Webpass customer. Pretty amazing service. Although lately they have been suffering from some slow speeds at peak times. I think its just growing pains due to large increases in their customer base. I believe it will be back to high speed soon. speedtests put me at around 100Mbps consistently when its "fast" and about 20-30 Mbps when its slow.
- tbrock 10y agoI hope this reduces the cost of their business offerings. I love the service, and the home offering is the deal of the century, but $500/month for 50Mb/sec symmetric or $250/month for 20Mb/sec symmetric is hard to swallow for our business (or any other). They offer faster service (gigabit and probably more) but what startup can pay 10k/month for their business internet? What's worse is monkeybrains and webpass should seemingly compete on price for business offerings but it seems like they actually collude. Their pricing for businesses is exactly the same.
- Tinyyy 10y agoI'm curious, why is it that business plans are so much more expensive than residential ones?
- gruez 10y agoPrice discrimination. Businesses tend to be more able to pay than home users.
- xyzzy123 10y agoThat plus one or more of: SLAs, guaranteed minimum bandwidth, much higher upstream, better tech support, etc.
- warfangle 10y agoAnd static IPs, and a lack of language in the contract stating that servers cannot be hosted on it, and so on and so forth.
- pyvpx 10y agoif by discrimination you mean guarantees versus best-efforts. business class services, speaking generally, are less or not at all over subscribed while providing contractual guarantees to service performance and problem resolution. residential is best effort. they'll do their best to keep it up and give you the speeds you pay for, but if it doesn't work out that way sometimes, well, they're sorry about that.
- shmerl 10y agoI hope it's not a sign that Google is slowing down fiber rollout and plans to switch to "new hot" wireless, but rather they'll push both.
- mmwave 10y agoFor those interested, you can get an idea of Webpass' network (with downloadable KMZ) by searching for their 70/80 GHz link registrations here: http://www.micronetcommunications.com/LinkRegistration/Query.aspx http://www.micronetcommunications.com/LinkRegistration/Query... Search on Licensee Name Webpass
- tlrobinson 10y agoDear Google: If you fuck up Webpass, you're dead to me. p.s. I'm watching you: http://i.imgur.com/rS9LGZ6.png http://i.imgur.com/rS9LGZ6.png
- JusticeJuice 10y agoWhat tool are you using there?
- tlrobinson 10y agoJust a little cron job shell script that dumps the results from a command-line speedtest.net client into Librato Metrics.
- dsk139 10y agoFormer Webpass employee here. Was one of the first software eng. hires. This is a great example of a bootstrapped business focused on customer experience that built up with no outside funding (that I know of). Congrats Charles & team.
- osi 10y agoGreat work. I was a customer at 673 W Brannan in SF back in '07. Best residential internet ever.
- ukd1 10y agoI'm at 673 for the last few years, it's still great!
- xhrpost 10y agoThe idea of starting an ISP without outside funding (unless you're a millionaire already) is pretty astonishing. Been researching the possibility of this myself recently and costs of infrastructure are simple astronomical.
- rhino369 10y agoGoing wireless is a lot cheaper. But you are right. They had to have had either founders capital or they took bank loans after they signed contracts.
- andrewfromx 10y agodoes anyone know the eta for los angeles?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- atburrow 10y agoThis is exciting news! In Chicago, I'm currently living in a high rise where the fastest plan I can get is 24 Mbps for around $80/mo. My high rise has an exclusivity contract with AT&T U-Verse. I've spoken with AT&T reps and they can't offer any higher speeds. I also talked to property management and they said there's nothing they can do for me. They are locked into an exclusivity contract with AT&T for the wires in the building. Does anyone have experience dealing with properties who claim to have exclusivity contracts? I talked to people at Webpass, and they've stated it is available in my area. They'd come in and set everything up free of charge. I don't see the downside for my building to allow Webpass to come in. I do know the FCC has regulations about exclusivity contracts with video providers, but I couldn't find any documents on things like internet. It seems like my only option is to find a place that does not have exclusivity contracts with providers.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nimish 10y agoYour property management company is likely receiving a significant sum of money from ATT to keep it this way. Unless you have access to their contract with ATT, you're SoL.
- visarga 10y ago> I can get is 24 Mbps for around $80/mo Bucharest internet pricing is 10$ / 1gbps, so that would come at about 320x price ratio, and still 5x cheaper than Google Fiber. Funny thing, the ISP I am getting this from set the price for 100mbps and 300mbps the same, 7$/month. As if a 200mbps difference is trivial.