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.
Disclosure edit: I'm a current Webpass P2P wireless customer. I was literally about to switch away from Webpass to another P2P wireless solution (we have a site evaluation next Monday) because Webpass has been unreliable for us lately. I'm really curious what, if anything, this means for Webpass and Google Fiber in SF.
At the same time it's kind of a huge embarrassment for Google not to offer Fiber in its own back yard. Fixed wireless gives Google a bridge to offering Google Fiber service in SF without taking on the SF government head on.
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.
I'm not concerned with who owns the fiber, I would just prefer not to have wireless involved because of weather and oversubscription.
The difference between that and fiber is who owned the glass. All of what I mentioned above, to my knowledge, is glass leased from other companies (Ex: AT&T). Their fiber product is glass they dug up the street and laid themselves - directly from the DC. If you look at the fiber maps in SF ( https://webpass.net/fiber ) they all start at 365 Main ( http://365datacenters.com/ ).
As a webpass customer, I have to say that weather and oversub have not been an issue for me for the last 3 years. For example this winter there was only 2 days where it rained hard enough (when it was REALLY coming down) to notice latency. In both cases it was for ~10mn and I only noticed because I was on SSH connections. Any muggle's netflix connection wouldn't even flinch.