Since it first broke ground in 2014, Longmont, Colorado’s community-owned NextLight fiber network has won numerous awards and inspired countless communities nationwide.

With its citywide deployment nearing completion, and counterproductive state legal restrictions in the rear view mirror, city leaders are now working to expand the network beyond city limits.

City officials tell ILSR that network construction has now crossed north of Colorado Highway 66, outside of city limits and into the Anhawa and Strawberry Circle neighborhoods. The extension will bring service to around 125 homes that previously had access to Longmont electrical utility service, but not broadband.

Longmont officials say this latest expansion is being financed entirely by subscriber revenues and money set aside for capital projects, with no bonding or other supplementary funds involved.

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“We’ve been carefully evaluating our opportunities for expansion in order to make best use of the community’s resources,” NextLight’s Scott Rochat told ILSR. “Our total investment in this project is just under $300,000; based on our typical rate of adoption, we expect to see about a five-year payback. This also has the benefit of giving us a foothold on the north side of (Highway) 66 to help facilitate more expansion in the future.”

Longmont, Colorado’s NextLight community fiber network isn’t just delivering fast and affordable fiber access to locals, it’s consistently winning awards nationwide.

The city-owned network has topped PC Magazine’s Readers’ Choice rankings, which asked readers to rate their satisfaction with their residential broadband providers. Nextlight was also rated as the top gaming ISP of 2023, and was rated the fastest ISP in the nation in 2018 and the second fastest ISP by the magazine last year.

The city was also rated the 17th best work-at-home city in another 2022 survey. This latest survey asked magazine readers to assess ISP satisfaction based on speed, reliability and value. NextLight excelled at all three.

“NextLight's near-perfect scores, including an astronomic 9.9 for overall satisfaction, are unprecedented in the history of PCMag's surveys of ISPs,” the magazine noted. “The company's lowest score is for setup, and yet that number is still higher than almost any other rating earned by another ISP in any category.”

For the past four consecutive years, community owned and/or operated broadband infrastructure has proven to be a key ingredient in the makings of some of the fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the nation.

As was the case last year, PCMag’s recently released Top 10 list of “The Fastest ISPs of 2022” feature operators that are either municipal broadband networks or use city-owned fiber or conduit to deliver service across whole or parts of their footprint (with the exception of this year’s ninth-place finisher). Another way of saying that is: not one of 10 fastest networks in the nation are owned or operated by the major national ISPs, many of whom have embarked on an aggressive lobbying campaign to misinform public officials in particular and the public in general on the viability and successes of municipal broadband and local partnerships.

After ranking the major ISPs in their own slower category, PCMag turns to “talk about real speed.” 

For that, you don’t go to the big guys … Higher speeds are found in smaller, localized ISPs.

Need for Speed? Look to Local ISPs and Munis

After PCMag compiled a year’s worth of speed tests to analyze which ISPs offer the fastest download and upload speeds, Sonic – a California-based independent ISP – came out on top this year, having “posted the highest number we have ever seen in our test results. Because the uploads this company offers are, on average, eclipsing download speeds—by a lot.”

Catapulting to the top of this year’s list (from 10th place last year), Sonic is a privately-owned company that uses publicly owned conduit in Brentwood, California.