My 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).

It'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.

me too: Argenta.

Coming from australia and not familiar at all with Webpass... is the latency low? ie. could people use this for gaming internet connections?

As 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

And no public IP, which was really disappointing when I switched from AT&T Uverse.

I'm always intensely curious what residential (and these days, even business) customers want with a dedicated, publicly routable IPv4 address.

why were you disappointed?

I wouldn't use it for anything too resource-intensive or important. It's just nice to have my home development environment available over SSH for the rare coding emergency. I shouldn't exaggerate how disappointed I am. It's obviously not very crucial to me, since it would be easy enough to set up a cheap VPN for tunneling but I haven't bothered to do that yet.

why not just use IPv6?

Someone will probably roll something like this out in the metro areas and it will eat the NBN

Webpass 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.

> was

:( such a sad truth.

I 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.

It's not illegal for a company to offer an alternative to the NBN. I think it is however mandatory for a provider who can service a dwelling with NBN to upgrade from a legacy technology (i.e. DSL) to the NBN.

This does not preclude other high-speed internet options servicing those dwellings.

For example, https://www.lightningbroadband.com.au offers or plans to offer 100/100 (actually, some pages have mentioned 200/200 but maybe that's coming later or business only). A salesperson explicitly told me they plan to service NBN-connected areas too but that they'll probably prioritise other non-NBN metro areas first, because the demand will be stronger.

Based 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.

Former 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.

after like 100kbps speed does not matter for gaming. you need a good quality connection (stable latency + no packet loss)

Yes.

It's point to point wireless to a building and Ethernet from there. No real latency issue there.

Curious what they're using for backhaul wireless links if they're offering 1 gbps service. Not many solutions can handle that kind of speed.

Right 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.

Are you preparing for popular streaming video products pushing 4K content?

A 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.

Looks like millimeter wave: https://webpass.net/about_network.

Weird, 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.

I've got about 15ms to google.com (and the silly speedtest.net page reports 4ms for whatever they chose nearby).

The latency to the West Coast Battle.net server is a very steady 12ms according to the Starcraft in-game UI.

I live in SF and have the 100mbps Webpass. Over my wifi, I get pings of <5ms to AWS us-west-1.