Looks like Google Fiber may not be as dead as feared. Alphabet/Google acquired Webpass last October as part of the company’s pivot toward next-generation wireless broadband. Webpass is a smaller ISP founded in 2003 that delivers gigabit connectivity to select apartment complexes and MDUs. Before the acquisition, Webpass already served roughly 20,000 business and residential customers in San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, and Miami.
Now if you go to their site and click on one of these cities will see you redirected to the Webpass website, where you can sign up to get Webpass internet so long as your building meets certain requirements.
From Googles website:
Customers in six metro areas — now marked by a green pin — may be eligible to use Webpass if their building has at least 10 units, and is wired with Ethernet cabling. Copper Ethernet wiring can allow for blazing gigabit speeds, making them an affordable alternative for building owners to install vs. coaxial cable or even fiber.
The future of Google Fiber has been murky of late; the company eliminated its CEO and a number of employees last year as part of a rumored move toward wireless. Several reports suggested a number of Google executives had grown weary of the slow pace, high cost and sadly relatively low adoption numbers of traditional fiber deployment, and had become excited by next-generation wireless broadband technologies like millimeter wave.
Hopefully this is just the first step in what will be a slow roll out of wireless gigabit internet to bring true competition to the internet market.