𝗕𝗥𝗢𝗪𝗡𝗦𝗩𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗘 𝗜𝗡𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗛𝗡𝗢𝗟𝗢𝗚𝗬 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗧 𝗡𝗢𝗧𝗘𝗦 𝗜𝗠𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗜𝗡 𝗖𝗜𝗧𝗬'𝗦 𝗙𝗜𝗕𝗘𝗥 𝗢𝗣𝗧𝗜𝗖 𝗖𝗔𝗕𝗟𝗘 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗖𝗘

 From the editor: Brownsville resident Christian Diaz, a Cisco Certified Network Associate, sent us a very technical letter that we posted on this blog June 9, 2025 detailing problems with the city's fiber optic cable implementation.  

Now, it appears, the situation has improved as we received this evening an anonymous letter, written in the style of Mr. Diaz, which we've posted below:

Late update: As of 2:11am CDT July 24, 2025, Lit Fiber moved over to Omni's provider which was/is vastly superior to their previous one: SmartCom.

Between a few other customers, myself, and confirmed by customer service, the network has shifted away from SmartCom and onto another provider. SmartCom remains as a backup provider for Omni; they had an outage the following day and it kicked in, so I called in and found out after letting them also know that it didn't switch back when the outage was 'fixed'.

Now it's great. No issues since that one-time next-day outage. No IPv6, but solid speeds, latency, and 0% packet loss all day and night long. Crazy promotions right now. $45/m for 500Mbps up and down--crazy stuff. It also includes a public IPv4 address--meaningless unless you're going to host something such a website/email/video game server/etcetera.

It seems as though things have settled and now is a great time to move over. Copper cables are on their way out as dial-up has, and though I didn't write it here earlier, I've been saying this all along: fiber is the future. The contract with the City was laying out plans for 10Gb service in 5 years or some such--I forgot the details; it's something like that if not that.

If things are going like I think they will, there'll be a little price war before Spectrum realizes their only remaining customers are dead, old, or otherwise don't know better, so they'll jack up prices--kind of like ATT does with DSL; don't quote me, but I think it's $80 for 3Mbps, c'mon.

"I save because I bundle with cable and phone," some will say. Not really, they wouldn't say that if they bothered to do any research. Voiply is $160-something a year and two months with some 60 free countries and all call waiting-type bells and whistles--plus you can have both the home phone and use an app on your cell phone so you can be in Mexico or wherever and still call and receive on your 'home phone' wherever you have cell phone service/Wi-Fi; and YouTube TV covers cable channels and is parity in cost with Spectrum at $80-something a month with three streams instead of just one cable box that uses an absurd amount of electricity--some use 140W just sitting all day and night--absurd! Put your hand over one when it's off and see what I mean; it's warm; that's wasted power. I think 140W 24/7 is $100 a month, right? For cell phone, Mint Mobile comes out to $15 a month before taxes if you just pre-pay the year with a one-time three-month option with that price for new customers; that's a 5GB line. Besides that, it's normally $30 for unlimited, but as I just checked, there's a $15 a month for one year promotion on that--the $15/m 5GB one-year prepay is not a promotion--the $15/m one-year prepay for unlimited data is. Whatever, my point is if you're on Spectrum, the bottom line is that you're not saving, and anyone that says that is flat-out woefully uninformed--barring rare cases such as if their employer pays for it.

Really, Spectrum had their monopoly for too long--cut the cable. There's no good reason for a resident to stay with them if they have the option to move over to Omni (and some other combination of services for phone/cell/tv).

I'm saying that not because it's 'Omni' either, but because it's fiber; and it's just better all around now.