U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Brownsville, Texas as one of best places to live in the Lone Star State and as one of the most affordable places to retire.

Now – as the border city continues to make progress on an ambitious revitalization initiative – it is adding to its “best, most affordable” resume by transforming the digital landscape with a citywide fiber network to bring fast, reliable, and affordable Internet service to its nearly 200,000 residents.

The effort is being launched on the back of a city-owned middle mile fiber backbone and partnership with Lit Fiber to build out last mile service, operating as Lit Fiber BTX.

“We just lit up our first subscriber and will have 10,000 locations-passed by the end of the year,” Rene Gonzalez, Lit Fiber’s Senior Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs, told ILSR this week.

“Brownsville was a place that had been neglected. But now, SpaceX is here. We are here. It’s exciting.”

The excitement was palpable last week at the BTX Demo Center in downtown Brownsville where city and Lit Fiber officials held a “special community social” to celebrate service getting turned on for the first LIT Fiber BTX subscriber and to showcase what the network will offer city residents and businesses moving forward.

With the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) poised to run out of funding in early Q2 next year, and no funding source lined up to keep the program alive, a recent U.S. News & World Report survey underscores the significance of the program in the face of rising prices from the nation’s major Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The ACP offers a monthly benefit of $30 dollars for qualifying households and $75 for qualifying households on Tribal lands (as well as in some remote areas). Over 20 million Americans to date have enrolled in the program to help pay their Internet service bills, but with the $14.2 billion ACP program on track to run dry as soon as May of next year – even amid a historic national effort to establish “Internet For All” – the affordability crisis has become more worrisome for a growing number of Americans.  

U.S. News & World Report’s survey found that Internet prices are going up and that families are compromising other expenses to pay for connectivity, affirming the urgency among digital equity advocates to identify a source of continued funding for ACP, as well as push for more structural solutions that address the root causes of why Americans pay among the highest prices for broadband service in the developed world.

On Episode 16 of the Connect This! show, co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) are joined by Sascha Segan (lead mobile analyst at PCMag.com) and Virgilio Fiorese (formerly of Ericsson, currently Senior Sales Director, Mavenir) to dig into 5G and the next generation of cellular networks to try and divorce the hype from the current and coming reality. 

Chris, Travis, Sascha, and Virgilio talk about whether ordinary Americans should care about 5G today (for either their home or mobile connection), the regulatory and deployment components of a 5G rollout, how T-Mobile's 5G Home Internet service is working for users right now, marketing, and the difference between a 5G network and an intelligently designed Fiber-to-the-Premises build with Wi-Fi 6 for fixed-place users. 

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Email us [email protected] with feedback, ideas for the show, or your pictures of weird wireless infrastructure to stump Travis.

Watch here, or below.

The merger between T-Mobile and Sprint is moving forward, notwithstanding legal opposition from multiple state attorneys general. In a recent article, Christopher Mitchell Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Networks Initiative, and Paul Goodman, Technology Equity Director from The Greenlining Institute, explained the tenuous reasoning behind the recent court decision and why they expect nothing good for subscribers and the state of competition as this deal comes to fruition.

We've shared the article in full here; you can also read it at The Greenlining Institute website.

EXPECT BROKEN PROMISES FROM T-MOBILE/SPRINT MERGER

By Christopher Mitchell and Paul Goodman

Earlier this week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit to stop the proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. As a result, it’s highly likely that by the end of the year, Sprint will no longer exist, and that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile will be the only major wireless providers in the United States. The judge’s decision is 170 pages long but boils down to this: The judge believes that even though T-Mobile will have the ability to increase prices, it won’t, because T-Mobile promised not to.

What, Exactly, has T-Mobile Promised?

The same things that communications providers have promised us for decades when drumming up support for a merger—lower prices, the creation of thousands of jobs, and new and exciting service offerings. As a result, the company argues, T-Mobile will have the size and resources to transform itself into a company like AT&T.

It’s that last sentence that’s particularly troubling. In 2018, AT&T purchased Time Warner Media, arguing that doing so would result in lower prices, the creation of thousands of jobs, and new and exciting product offerings. Which sounds fantastic, except for the fact that AT&T failed to deliver on those promises:

When his Twitter feed announced the “arrival of 5G” last December, tech reporter Chris Matyszczyk made a beeline for the nearest T-Mobile store and asked, “Can I have some of this 5G, please? I will become a much more desirable, admirable person if I have 5G!” From there, it was all downhill.

The Pain of the Hype 

We aren’t the only ones who have pointed out the hype around 5G as telecom companies rush to outdo each other. In another case of marketing mayhem overtaking technical truth, Matyszczyk shares his rain soaked pursuit in the Bay Area. Expecting fanfare, he was met with a surprisingly subdued store:

I wandered into a T-Mobile store that was emptier than a politician's tweet.

Oddly, there weren't 99 pink balloons hanging from the ceiling to celebrate 5G. There weren't even five.

He goes on to describe how the less-than-enthusiastic salespeople didn’t seem very well informed about when, where, or why 5G isn’t available to him when the company indicated that it arrived nationwide:

"But isn't it a bit annoying to be told there's this incredibly exciting 5G when you can't get it for at least another six months?"

They seemed neither to agree or disagree. They seemed like they were annoyed it was raining and that I was there, dripping.

Read the full article, "I went to T-Mobile to ask about 5G. The response was painful" here. You can also watch an interview with Matyszczyk.

He expressed sympathy for the salespeople. After all, he says, “it’s hard for them to present something they can’t actually sell you.”

Marketplace spoke with experts, including Gigi Sohn and our Christopher Mitchell, about the hype surrounding 5G. Sohn said, "5G is 80% marketing and 20% technology. The hype around this technology is enormous, and also the hype around needing to win a so-called race around 5G."

Listen to the story here: