500Mbps broadband for $55 a month offered by wireless ISP

An Internet service provider called Webpass sells consumers 500Mbps upload and download speeds for just $55 a month—and instead of selling it over fiber or cable, the company says it delivers the service with point-to-point wireless technology. The service is targeted at multi-unit residential buildings and businesses; the company also plans to install fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) in some locations, but hasn’t done so yet.

Webpass was started in 2003 in San Francisco, raising the speeds over the years as wireless technology has improved, but founder Charles Barr says it’s pretty common for people to tell him that they’ve “never heard of Webpass.” That’s because the point-to-point service Webpass offers is only financially feasible in big cities, and even then not in single family homes.

“We’re building-specific,” Barr, who was a network administrator before founding Webpass, told Ars. “It does me no good to put a billboard up in the city and say, ‘hey, call Webpass,’ and have half the city call and say, ‘I live in a single-family home, can you bring me service for $55?’ The answer is no. But if you’re in one of our residential buildings or one of our commercial buildings, you’ve heard of Webpass because we market very specifically to those buildings, or it’s word of mouth.”

Ars spoke to Barr last week after his 80-employee company announced its entry into Boston, its fifth metro location. The company is deploying infrastructure in the city and expects to serve customers in less than two months.

Wireless Internet service providers that deliver home broadband service—as opposed to mobile data to smartphones—are common in rural areas. These providers generally offer speeds only up to 15Mbps or so, but they’re also bringing connectivity to single-family homes in sparsely populated areas where the only wired choice is often slow DSL, or nothing.

Webpass doesn’t serve the suburbs outside major cities, let alone rural America. Within its service area—San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, Chicago, and soon in Boston—Webpass delivers broadband to commercial buildings and residential buildings with a minimum of 10 units.

Webpass has about 20,000 residential subscribers, many living in high-rises. But most of the buildings Webpass delivers service to are commercial, and that’s where the company makes most of its money, charging higher prices to deliver greater reliability than residential customers get. Barr said revenue is “very substantially over $10 million” per year.

Webpass gets backhaul from transit providers at Internet exchange points, and from there delivers signals wirelessly to antennas on building rooftops. Inside the buildings, Internet access is provided via standard Ethernet cable.

“It’s point-to-point wireless,” Barr said. “When people think wireless they think point-to-multi-point… point-to-multi-point wireless is like your home router or cellular service, or something that has one base station where multiple devices connect to it. It works in the fact that you have connectivity but… it’s not consistently good. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

The network is a mesh. A building connected to Webpass has two transceivers on the roof, one to serve that building and a second to serve the next building in the network. As long as there is a line-of-sight connection from one building to another, Webpass can deliver service.

“You want [the buildings] to be close, within 5,000 meters,” Barr said. “Anything beyond 5,000 meters will still work but you lose bandwidth.”

Webpass buildings have radios capable of delivering up to 2Gbps both upstream and downstream. For residential service, Webpass advertises either 100, 200, or 500Mbps to each unit, depending on where the building fits in the network. The price is always $55 per month regardless of the speed. Residents can get a $160 discount by buying a full year of service for $500.

Webpass equipment being installed.

Credit: Webpass

Performance fluctuates

Residents share their building’s bandwidth with each other, so performance may not always hit the lofty heights of 100 to 500Mbps.

“During peak hours (weekday evenings), the service will slow to a CRAWL,” wrote one Webpass customer who reviewed the service on Yelp a couple of months ago. “I’m talking about 1Mbps, making everything just unusable. This is coming from plugging in my laptop directly into the wall jack as suggested by Webpass.”

Most customers rated Webpass very highly, though.

“Webpass is the first Internet company that I have ever raved about,” one user wrote last month, after moving out of San Francisco. “Our speeds were consistently in the 500Mbps range both up and down. We routinely streamed TV and movies without incident.”

Barr said at Webpass, “we always under-promise and over-deliver.” But he noted that “price trumps performance in residential and it will fluctuate over the course of the day.”

“We’re very up-front with the sharing and we tell all the residential customers, this is a shared service,” he said.

Bad weather can harm wireless service quality; a Webpass spokesperson said, “the radios we use can withstand rainy weather conditions” and that the company’s network “doesn’t necessarily go down” during thunderstorms.

1Gbps

Webpass business plans cost anywhere from $125 a month to $5,500 a month, for speeds from 10Mbps to 1Gbps. The prices depend both on speed and data limits. Pricier plans have unlimited data while the cheaper ones have “data transfer” limits of 1TB to 10TB per month. The business service also has a one-time installation fee of $300 for “on-net buildings” and $3,000 for “off-net buildings.”

There are no data caps or data overage charges for residential customers, Webpass told Ars.

“The reason there’s a price difference between a residential service and a business service is residential services are shared, business services are not,” Barr said. Besides that, “residential services are not guaranteed.”

Webpass’s commercial customers span a wide range of industries.

“We have every type of structure you could imagine,” Barr said. “We’ve got boats. One of our customers is a [military] boat and it sits there at the dock and it’s a Webpass customer and it has been for years. We have warehouses with two guys and a gazillion servers mining for bitcoins. We’ve got major banks, we’ve got HBO Films, we’ve got major Fortune 500 companies in downtown high-rises.”