I admit it. The news made me chuckle.

Mind you, it was a good story – a White House announcementabout a further narrowing of the digital divide. Specifically, 20 of the nation’s largest internet providers had agreed to offer 100-megabit service to income-qualified customers for $30/month or less … meaning the service would be effectively free after the federal Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) subsidies kicked in.

Yes, definitely good news. So why the small laugh?

Because for NextLight, it’s also old news.

One of the nice things about being a community-owned network is that you also have the opportunity to be community-focused. That’s why we began offering free internet to qualifying families with St. Vrain students in 2019, a year before the pandemic ever reached Colorado. And why we added more discounts in 2020 and then doubled them in 2021. For the last year, an income-qualified NextLight customer has been able to get free 100-megabit residential service or – if they want something even faster – gigabit service for just $19.95/month. 

After all, we’re Longmont’s internet. We’ve said from the start that high-speed service is a key utility, just like water and electricity. So we want to make it as easy as possible for Longmont to take advantage of what NextLight can do.

And now that the rest of the nation is catching on  … well, we’re pretty proud to be ahead of that curve. (Proud enough to even share it on national TV, for that matter!) It means that we’re serving you well, and that’s what this is about.

If you know someone who could benefit from this, send them our way. We’ll be glad to set them up with our income-qualified service. And if you’re a NextLight customer, we’ll also give you a send-a-friend discount as a thank-you.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep cheering on the efforts to bridge the digital divide. Even as we keep building plank after plank ourselves.

That’s good news for everyone.