Texas gubernatorial candidates battle over state of fledgling broadband expansion

Gov Greg Abbott (R-TX) was recently in Laredo (TX) touting his efforts to get the roughly 7 million Texans without broadband access online, something he deemed an emergency item in the last legislative session. But Abbott’s Democratic challenger, Beto O'Rourke (D-TX), has been hammering him for vetoing a bill that would have shored up state funding used to build and maintain phone lines that carry broadband service in rural areas. O’Rourke blamed the veto for phone bills jumping by as much as $4.61 in August for some rural Texans. The political sparring underscores how tenuous the state of broadband remains in Texas, where some 2.8 million homes do not have access to high-speed internet, according to the comptroller’s office. State officials are gearing up for a massive, federally funded buildout of the service, but have not figured out how to fund it in the long run. Texas is on tap to receive $500 million from the American Rescue Plan and as much as $4 billion through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, though the actual amount has yet to be determined. It’s also unclear how many homes the federal funding will be able to get online. By some estimates, it could cost as much as $15 billion to get every home connected to high-quality fiber networks.