Brownsville resident Christian Diaz, who cites his qualifications as a Cisco Certified Network Associate, has some issues with the City of Brownsville's implementation of fiber optic cable throughout the city, a $19.5M Fiber Network Coordination Agreement between the City of Brownsville, Texas Brownsville Public Utility Board, Lit Texas, LLC and its affiliate, BTX Fiber, LLC
Initially, Mr. Diaz's concerns were conveyed to the city's Audit Committee, considering their role to provide guidance with respect to risk management, financing and public accountability.
Mr. Diaz states: "If I'm reading the contract correctly, the city, upon satisfactory completion in accordance to the requirements of the contract, will release up to $19.5M to Lit Texas."
Diaz continues: "I'm here to tell you that it appears to my amateur eyes in reading the City of Brownsville financials document that the city still holds that money under the title of "Fiber Broadband Fund," and I don't think the network is ready. I may be mistaken, but I believe that the city is supposed to or may yet be collecting $5 per connection port from Lit Texas, but I don't see those collections reported in the City of Brownsville financials document. I have reason to believe that Lit Texas, in partnership with the City of Brownsville, is selling a service that it knows that, at this moment, it cannot provide as I reported the issue via their ticket portal, and in Friday May 23 personally went to their office on Levee St to report to their sales manager. . . to whom I've sent weeks and weeks of tests and evidence.
Every day, between the hours of 5PM and 11PM, it appears to me that their downstream service becomes congested, sometimes bad enough to reach only 5Mbps out of the 500Mbps that I have serviced at my home.
I know that it's not just me or my lines because I have evidence that I test perfectly with their local server which speedtest.net defaults to, but not so to Dallas where most all internet communication goes to in Texas before being routed elsewhere. Additional to the low bandwidth, I have evidence that I've gotten up to 12% packet loss during this peak hours.
That same advertisement mistakes bytes and bits (1 Gigabyte= 8 Gigabits). The ratio mixup may be a kind of misprint, but the inconsistent speeds may be downright fraudulent.
Internet service is supposed to be run like a gym membership where there's more customers than machines, balancing out between frequent and infrequent customers, but here, there's a line running out the door and people are wrestling over the machines. It's also like water service where you expect the faucet to run, and all you get is a dribble all throughout after-work hours."
Diaz has also discovered that Lit Texas receives internet service from SmartCom in Dallas, rated at 100 Gbps.
For comparison, Spectrum has 1000Gbps, using copper cabling, supposedly inferior to fiber optic, raising the question as to why fiber optic is only operating at 100Gbps.
Something else Diaz explained, as we talked at H.E.B. Plus, is that Lit Texas is supposed to lay enough underground fiber optic cable for two competitor companies, thus allowing for competitive pricing, avoiding a monopoly. The city is supposed to hold a "provider lottery" for such competition to be included in the local fiber optic market.
Diaz also mentions the "Affordability Connectivity Program," saying it's the city's responsibility to make the availability of such a program for low income and disabled residents.
Diaz also suggests the city form an Internet and Technology Committee to review the contract for fiber optic and its implementation.
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Good information to have. Almost signed up. Glad I waited. Basic Spectrum is like an old neighborhood crackho, it's a cheap blow job with no great expectations
ReplyDeleteSo who owns these companies? Lit Texas? BTX Fiber? What does the City of Brownsville know about technology?
ReplyDelete(1/?) A few corrections:
ReplyDeleteI had sent a tip in to the Brownsville Audit and Oversight Committee, but broadly speaking--that is, at least with the bandwidth and packet loss--I first reported to Lit on April 23 ~11pm.
I went in to their Levee store on the Friday leading up to Memorial Day weekend, and by that point, I had already submitted several days worth of speed tests to their network engineer, and some to the email for the parent/sister(?) company 'Medina Fiber': info@medinafiber.net. On that day, I did not directly speak to their sales manager, Paul, who appears in the mentioned deceptive advertisement that is on the BTX News YT page (https://youtu.be/GKdAmypb9EM?&t=93); instead, I spoke with his subordinate supervisor, Ernest.
'Every day' largely depends on peak usage. Weekdays are much worse than weekends where weekdays it starts at 5pm, but in my experience, speeds greatly slow down every day by 11pm.
To elaborate on the part about my lines and theirs: I test perfectly every time to their Brownsville test server which tells me my lines leading up to them are perfect; however, testing past their lines shows degraded connection which tells me that the issue is on their end; that and--to get a bit technical--I've run a traceroute and pings throughout each hop that shows exactly where the issue appears, and it's between two of SmartCom's servers and another two of Smartcom's servers presumably because the first two are leased to Lit and the other two are SmartCom's edge routers.
I did file an informal FCC complaint, and they had not answered after their month of being notified by the FCC--at least, according to the FCC.
Feel free to look up the lines of each provider at https://peeringdb.net AS20115 for Charter/Spectrum and AS14860 for SmartCom. You can look up your own IP and get the AS number at https://radar.qrator.net.
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ReplyDeleteSmartCom is in McAllen, TX, and they have a total of 140Gbps--20 to each coast and 100 to Dallas. The speeds to Dallas are especially significant because it's likely that most all of our Internet services going to be coming from datacenters that are located there; if not, at least routed from there.
The ACP law in the City contract "Fiber Network Coordination Agreement" is coded in "US Code Title 47, Chapter I, Subchapter B, Part 54.1804(b) shall 'Publicize the availability of the Affordable Connectivity Program in a manner reasonably designed to reach those likely to qualify for the service and in a manner that is accessible to individuals with disabilities.'"
If you click 'show availability' on the Omni page, and put your address, it doesn't show the related program. Instead, you have to scroll down and pick Brownsville that is obfuscated by being mixed in a large pool of other cities many of which don't even have their service (according to those same pages).
I'm very excited to invite more investors, perhaps a community owned ISP to run for that lottery--if only the City gives enough time for people to prepare according to the stipulated third party auditor's list of requirements to apply for that Provider Lottery.
Spectrum uses copper to the home via coaxial cable, but I believe that they use fiber throughout everywhere else.
To Lit/Omni customers: I invite you to do your own speed tests, but it's important to do it a certain way to show the true results.
First, go to speedtest.net on a PC wired to your modem (actually: ONT) or router, if you insist doing it over Wi-Fi (which you shouldn't do) then be sure to select 'show desktop mode' on your browser in order to see and select 'Change Server'. Click Change Server and pick something in Dallas--ideally something a bit further down the list. I like Boost Mobile. Further down the list because I get inflated rates from Frontier and Nitel locations (and I think it's because it's using the local servers with the inflated rates in addition). See your results. Do the same, but now pick Brownsville's Lit test server and compare.
Also try this: refresh the desktop page of speedtest.net, and in the middle bottom of the control panel, in gray letters/figure, toggle/click multi connection to change it to single connection. Now, select literally anything other than Lit's Brownsville test server and then do that again to compare to that same server. See a difference?
Of course, as mentioned earlier, the best times to see the difference are weekdays between 5p-11p, closer to 11p.
You'll notice the up bandwidth is fine, but the down--not so much. The timing and up/down ratio strongly evidences that Lit has underprovisioned their bandwidth to supply customers, and together with the video advertisement on BTX TV, implicated the City with false advertisement.
I used https://packetlosstest.com/ to get the packet loss results. I particularly liked using the Counter-Strike 2 preset test.
Finally, that's not a photo of me.