Texas has awarded Charter Communications and three cooperatives approximately $18.5 million in grant funding to partially reimburse them for pole replacement costs.

The grant awards were made by the Texas Broadband Pole Replacement Program. Those winning awards replaced more than 11,000 poles that support retail broadband services that serve rural, unserved areas. 

To win awards, companies must replace poles with new poles that provide a minimum of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. New poles must, on average, provide symmetrical speeds of 1 Gbps and be in areas where approximately 18% of locations are categorized as unserved.

In addition to Charter, award winners are Bartlett Electric Cooperative, MidSouth Electric Cooperative, and United Electric Cooperative Services Inc. 

These firms got their rewards for work in Anderson, Bell, Bowie, Delta, Erath, Franklin, Grimes, Henderson, Hopkins, Hunt, Kaufman, Madison, Milam, Sabine, San Augustine, Van Zandt, and Walker counties.

“Our agency is awarding this critical funding under our legislative directive to connect every Texan to broadband service,” Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar said in the announcement

“Ensuring all Texans have access to reliable, high-speed internet is important for Texas’ continued economic growth and prosperity.”

A much bigger amount of funding is in the future. Hegar’s office, which administers the Texas Broadband Development Office, announced a second round of the Bringing Online Opportunities to Texas program. 

The round will provide a mix of funding from the federal Capital Projects Fund and the state’s Broadband Infrastructure Fund to provide as much as $729 million to benefit more than 95,000 locations in 24 counties across Texas. The initiative could connect 20% of Texans who lack access to reliable broadband.

Pole attachments have always been a big issue for telecommunications providers. Last December, the FCC dealt with it in two ways. The first was a Report and Order establishing the Rapid Broadband Assessment Team (RBAT), an intra-agency rapid response team to manage pole attachment disputes. 

Secondly, the FCC released a Declaratory Ruling that deals with specific issues of interest to the pole attachment ecosystem, such as clarifying that “red tagged” poles are those the utility thinks need replacement for reasons other than lack of capacity. It also establishes timelines for processing attachment requests involving 3,000 or more poles.

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