President Named for Newly Created Fiber Company

The Internet service provider (ISP) that plans to take middle-mile and last-mile connectivity to the city of Brownsville, BTX Fiber, has named Richard Hogue president. He most recently was general manager for Point Broadband in Hagerstown, Md., and will relocate.

BTX Fiber is a subsidiary of Lit Communities, an Alabama firm that takes communities through the research, planning and installation steps of creating state-of-the-art fiber networks, according to a news release.

Brownsville has invested nearly $20 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to build the middle-mile network.

Hogue has more than 20 years of telecommunications construction, installation and management experience, including six years as a technical operations manager for Comcast in three states and two years as network operations director for digital communications provider Viya in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“Brownsville is quite literally pushing out the leading edge in broadband Internet availability to the community,” Hogue said. “BTX Fiber is thrilled to be crucial to this effort in partnership with the city of Brownsville and so many other critical stakeholders.

“I personally am excited about the potential this rollout has to positively impact so many facets of life here in the Brownsville community, and I’m looking forward to leading BTX Fiber as we build deep, new business and community relationships as well as a new Internet network.”

Other partners in the project include the Brownsville Public Utilities Board, Greater Brownsville Incentives Corp., Brownsville Community Improvement Corp., Port of Brownsville, Brownsville Independent School District, Texas Southmost College and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Lit Communities was co-founded in 2019 by Brownsville native and Chief Strategy Officer Rene Gonzalez and has committed $70 million for the network’s fiber-to-the-premise buildout.