NextLight Built Something Rare. Now Longmont Needs to Decide What to Do With It.

In 2011, Longmont voted to allow the city to provide telecommunications services — and in doing so, placed itself in direct conflict with Colorado state law that had been written largely by Comcast and CenturyLink lobbyists. Proposition 300 passed with more than 60% of the vote. The city filed for an exemption. It won. And then it spent three years building a fiber-optic network from the ground up.

NextLight launched in 2014 with a simple proposition: gigabit internet — symmetric, 1,000 megabits per second up and down — for $60 a month. No contracts. No data caps. No annual price increases designed to frustrate customers out of their promotional rate. At the time, Comcast's fastest residential plan in Longmont topped out at 105 Mbps download. The upload speed they advertised — 10 Mbps — was less than one percent of what NextLight offered both directions.

Ten years later, NextLight has achieved something genuinely remarkable: roughly 60% of Longmont households subscribe to a city-owned internet service that has been ranked among the fastest and most affordable in the United States. Comcast's pricing in Longmont is lower than comparable markets where it faces no municipal competition. The city has collected tens of millions of dollars in revenue that subsidizes the utility rather than the city's general fund — and that, critically, doesn't leave Longmont the way that Comcast revenue does.

This is a success story. An unusual one. But Longmont hasn't finished the work of deciding what to do with it.

What NextLight Actually Did to the Market

When NextLight launched, the conventional wisdom was that municipal broadband was a romantic idea that didn't survive contact with the economics of telecommunications. The telecom industry's preferred narrative held that cities were inefficient operators that would run up debt, fail to compete with private providers, and ultimately stick taxpayers with the bill.

That hasn't happened in Longmont. NextLight's financials have been consistently positive, with the utility generating enough revenue to service its initial debt, fund ongoing capital improvements, and contribute to the city's utility infrastructure without general fund subsidy. The 60% residential penetration rate — the percentage of homes that subscribe — is exceptional. Most successful municipal fiber networks in the United States operate at 30–40% penetration. At 60%, NextLight has enough revenue density to operate comfortably.

More importantly, NextLight's presence has changed what Comcast charges its remaining customers. Competition works. In markets where Comcast operates without a municipal alternative, prices drift upward. In Longmont, the presence of NextLight constrains what Comcast can charge — a benefit that accrues to every Longmont resident, including the 40% who don't subscribe to NextLight.

This is the underappreciated value of municipal broadband that doesn't show up on NextLight's balance sheet: the competitive discipline it imposes on the private provider. When the city council debates NextLight's value, they should be counting the lower Comcast bills paid by residents who chose not to switch, as well as the bills paid by those who did.

The Economic Development Argument Nobody Is Making Loudly Enough

Longmont's economic development offices promote the city's quality of life, its location along the Front Range, its proximity to Boulder and Denver, and its manufacturing base. What they should be leading with, and aren't, is NextLight.

For businesses that are data-intensive — software development, digital media, remote professional services, research, biotechnology — internet connectivity is infrastructure as fundamental as roads and water. A company evaluating a location decision between Longmont and a competitor city that relies on Comcast is making a comparison that Longmont wins by a significant margin. Symmetric gigabit fiber at $60 per month versus asymmetric cable broadband at $90 per month or more, with slower upload speeds that constrain cloud workflows and video conferencing, is not a close call for any company whose work moves data.

Longmont hasn't fully leveraged this advantage. The city's economic development materials mention NextLight, but they don't lead with it. There is no active program to recruit data-intensive businesses specifically because of the city's broadband infrastructure. There is no "NextLight Business District" designation for areas with the densest fiber coverage that could serve as a recruitment tool. The asset exists — the marketing program to capitalize on it doesn't.

Colorado has the second-largest aerospace economy in the country. Aerospace and space tech are increasingly data-intensive fields. Longmont already has Maxar, Redwire, and multiple aerospace suppliers. The NextLight network — combined with the city's location and existing aerospace workforce — creates a genuinely differentiated pitch for companies that are looking for Front Range operations centers. That pitch should be made more aggressively.

The Remaining 40 Percent

NextLight's 60% penetration rate is impressive. The 40% who haven't switched represents both a revenue opportunity and a question worth asking.

Some of that 40% is Comcast loyalists who aren't interested in switching. Some are renters whose landlords haven't authorized the installation. Some are residents in multi-unit buildings where the economics of fiber installation are more complex. And some are residents who haven't been reached by NextLight's marketing, which has historically relied heavily on word of mouth.

The landlord problem is underexamined. A significant share of Longmont's housing stock is rental property, and rental tenants often can't choose their internet provider because the landlord controls which providers are allowed in the building. This creates a situation where lower-income renters — the residents who would most benefit from NextLight's lower prices — are effectively excluded from the network by their lease terms.

The city has some leverage here that it hasn't fully used. Longmont owns the utility infrastructure that connects to multi-unit buildings. The city could adopt a policy requiring new multi-family developments receiving city approvals or incentives to allow NextLight access — a provision that would cost new developers nothing but landlord preference and would expand NextLight's reach into the residential segments where it currently underperforms.

What Comes Next: Infrastructure for the Coming Decade

NextLight was designed for the internet of 2014. The infrastructure it built is capable of far more than home and business internet service — and Longmont should be planning now for how to use it.

The Advanced Air Mobility buildout that we've written about separately (see our piece on Vance Brand Airport) depends on low-latency connectivity for drone command and control, real-time airspace management, and remote piloting operations. NextLight's fiber backbone is exactly the kind of infrastructure that these systems require. A city with both a functional small airport and a city-owned gigabit fiber network is in a dramatically better position to attract AAM operations than a city with only one of those things.

Smart city infrastructure — connected traffic signals, air quality sensors, flood monitoring, smart streetlights — all requires connectivity. Every deployed sensor, every connected signal, every environmental monitor is a NextLight customer of some kind. The city's smart infrastructure deployment could be funded in part by the efficiencies it generates in city operations, with the connectivity revenue flowing back to NextLight.

There is also a workforce development opportunity that hasn't been seized. NextLight operates one of the most sophisticated local fiber networks in the country. That expertise — in fiber installation, network operations, and customer service — is genuinely valuable. The city could partner with Front Range Community College to develop a NextLight-adjacent broadband technician training program, creating a pipeline of certified workers for a field that is experiencing national labor shortages as municipal broadband expands elsewhere.

The Lesson Other Cities Haven't Learned Yet

In the decade since NextLight launched, dozens of American cities have studied Longmont's model and considered building their own municipal broadband networks. Most haven't moved forward, stopped by industry opposition, startup costs, or the political difficulty of taking on an established incumbent.

Longmont has something those cities want and haven't built. The city should be more deliberate about sharing what it's learned — not as altruism, but as economic development strategy. A city that is seen as a national model for civic technology innovation attracts the kinds of companies, residents, and talent that help sustain that innovation cycle.

The work isn't done. The 40% penetration gap needs to close. The economic development case needs to be made more assertively. The infrastructure needs to evolve to serve the next decade's requirements, not just the last decade's. And the competitive discipline NextLight imposes on Comcast needs to be maintained — which means the city has to remain a committed, long-term operator of a service that its residents depend on.

Longmont built something rare. Now comes the harder work of not squandering it.