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.

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."

Webpass radios operate in many different frequencies, including the unlicensed 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands used by Wi-Fi, Barr said. Webpass also uses the 6, 11, 18, 23, 24, 60, 70, and 80GHz bands. These include a mix of licensed and unlicensed frequencies; the licensed ones require licenses for each site from the FCC.

Interference differs greatly from one band to another, Barr noted.

"If you're going to use 2.4 or 5GHz, you're going to have interference," he said. "You just have to do a site survey and you have to periodically go back and check and take readings from that roof and say, ‘ok this is still clean spectrum.'"

60GHz, by contrast, "is basically interference-free but it only goes 500 meters," he said.

A wild building appears

Picking the right frequency isn't the only factor to consider when adding a new location to the Webpass network.

"A building could go right up in the middle of your link and it won't work, so you have to make sure that you know what's going on physically in the cities you operate in," Barr said.

Although Barr maintains that "there is no performance difference between point-to-point-wireless and fiber," Webpass is starting to install some fiber of its own. About 100 buildings in San Francisco where Webpass delivers wireless service are being switched over to fiber-to-the-premises, allowing total bandwidth of 10Gbps to each site, Barr said.

Adding fiber to Webpass's arsenal will simplify the network, reducing the number of wireless hops data has to make when traveling from one building to another. It'll also help secure some businesses that don't believe wireless is good enough.

"There are some companies that will only accept fiber," Barr said. "They won't accept wireless because they have a connotation in their mind that wireless doesn't work."

Barr said Webpass will continue charging the same prices regardless of whether a building is connected to wireless or fiber.

No matter how successful the fiber rollout is, wireless will remain an important part of Webpass's network. Wireless allows Webpass to reach more buildings at lower cost and without lengthy construction.

"Some companies demand it must be point-to-point-wireless because they have a fiber connection with another company and they want geographic redundancy," Barr said.

And besides, there might be some more boats that need Internet service.