A comrade posted about this USA federal program a while ago. So I spent a few days looking into it.

Website was fairly clear, making an account was no problem, site function is pretty good (no hanging pages, dead links, etc). There’s a link to a page where you can put in your city/state or zip code and it gives a <100% accurate list of businesses that participate in the program. (So if you already have a service provider and they aren’t listed, call their customer service number and ask if they participate in the Affordable Connectivity Program. Two of the local telecoms that service my area participate, and their customer service people absolutely knew about the program and seemed genuinely happy to let me know what I needed to do.)

It took a day or so for the ACP site to tell me I was approved. The first page after logging in to the site has your “Application ID” right there for you to see. This is the magic number to give to your ISP. I contacted my ISP about midway through the billing cycle and gave them the info they wanted. They didn’t contact me to let me know when the discount was going to be applied but it showed up as a 30 dollar credit on my next full month’s bill. Which dropped my current internet bill down by 77%.

So, its all very :hexbear-retro:, so far.

A new internet service just came out to my house today to finish running actual fiberoptic with ~100Mbps up/down (compared to my original provider with 15/1… which is … :downbear: ). From the ACP site’s FAQ page, the credit is transferable to a new ISP and all I think I needed to do was just give the new ISP the Application ID number. So I’ve started the process with the new ISP and get to wait to see if I understood the program’s directions for transferring the credit correctly.

So at the very least, if you’re already on some government assistance, this should be a breeze if you want to try for it.

I didn’t look at the part of the application process for people who would need to provide more documentation for income verification. So I don’t have any useful things to say about that.