Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#21

Post by teen » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 12:57 AM UTC

bobbles wrote: post #5

boulos wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

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.

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#22

Post by aquilaFiera » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 12:58 AM UTC

If you listen, you can hear the sound San Francisco rental managers rejoicing they can advertise they have Google Fiber.

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#23

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 12:59 AM UTC

jerryr wrote: post #15

gkop wrote: post #7

Webpass 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

I'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/regu…

I 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.

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#24

Post by xeno42 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:03 AM UTC

Interesting.. 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.

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#25

Post by firloop » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:06 AM UTC

bobbles wrote: post #5

boulos wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

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

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#26

Post by rosege » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:08 AM UTC

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #19

bobbles wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#27

Post by pbarnes_1 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:10 AM UTC

rosege wrote: post #26

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#28

Post by kbar13 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:17 AM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #9

bobbles wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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)

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#29

Post by jboydyhacker » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:19 AM UTC

I 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.

Re: Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass

#30

Post by ShakataGaNai » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:27 AM UTC

gkop wrote: post #7

Webpass 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

That's not entirely correct. Webpass has been using glass provided by other companies for years, that's how they get the redundancy in the mesh.

In 10 months they've been laying down their own glass trunk lines along a VERY small corridor. Last year was ~15 blocks of Howard St. This year was supposed to be Bryant St. So if you were in SOMA you had a decent chance.

Google has already stated they were going to use some other providers glass along with deploying their own in the city. This seems like a really good way to jump start things for GF in SF.