Free Lunch and Low Cost Internet, sounds like the greatest day of your life right? Well I have some bad news for you. I am neither offering free lunch or low cost internet and I don’t know where to get them either.

However, a hand full of cable providers: BendBroadband, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Charter, Cox Communications, Eagle Communications, GCI, Insight, Mediacom, Midcontinent, Sjoberg’s Cable, Suddenlink, and Time Warner Cable have all agreed to participate in the Federal Communications Commission's Connect to Compete program.

The program offers 1 Mbps cable  Internet service for $9.95 per month as well as a free rental or low-cost purchase of cable modem to households with children in school (k-12) who qualify for free lunch under the National School Lunch Program. The program is designed to help address the concern of cost in providing broadband internet to those who claim that they do not have it because they cannot afford it. The public events surrounding this issue are awash with antidotes of parents driving their school aged children to libraries after hours to sit in the parking lot and utilize the free Wi-Fi so the children can complete their homework.

It is a reminder of how important access to the Internet can be particularly a fast connection in the home. Some of you will be sure to point out that I left Comcast off the list. Comcast has already started offering this service as part of its Internet Essentials program. Unlike the other cable providers on this list, Comcast began offering its service as a condition of being able to acquire NBC Universal. So we list Comcast separately because the other cable providers did not require acquisition of a media company to begin offering this low cost service. One wonders why the FCC would have made this a condition of the merger when so many other cable providers readily agreed to the program.

Regardless, a low-cost option with a decent broadband speed is a step in the right direction even if it is limited to National School Lunch Program participants. Everyone needs access to the Internet and this program is, hopefully, a step in the right direction.