Ammon, Idaho, got our attention years ago but as benefits from the city’s publicly owned fiber optic infrastructure continue to grow, others are taking notice. Most recently, contributing editor at Fast Company, Jay Woodruff wrote about the community’s investment in Fast Company's “The New Capitalism” series.
Woodruff notes that Ammon, with only about 16,500 people, has surpassed large cities in quality of connectivity and choice of Internet access providers. Woodruff quotes Bruce Patterson, Technology Director in Ammon: “If you were to ask me what the key component of Ammon is, I would say it’s a broadband infrastructure as a utility. We’ve just found a way to make it a true public infrastructure, like a road.”
Woodruff describes how the infrastructure is being integrated into the community’s larger development:
Residents of Ammon can choose to opt in to the network, which the city began building in 2011. Patterson expects that by the end of 2019, 900 of the town’s 4,500 residences will have joined the network. The city is growing, adding new residential addresses at a rate of about one per day, and Patterson says that every single developer is choosing to include the fiber infrastructure in new construction.
When asked what makes Ammon’s network better than other options available in communities such as New York and San Francisco, Patterson offered four factors:
Read morePUBLIC UTILITY: The city of Ammon manages the network the same way it handles water services or road maintenance. “If we could simply come to a point as a nation where we would say internet infrastructure is essential and we’re going to make sure that everybody has access to it,” Patterson says, “that would be a huge step forward.”
CHOICE: … There are eight local ISPs, and users can switch among them instantly without requiring a “truck roll” (a visit from the ISP to adapt hardware at the customer’s location), because Ammon uses software to “virtualize...
SiFi will use a microtrenching method to install most of the conduit and will begin with what they call the “pilot phase” located in the southwest corner of the city. SiFi will take the opportunity to refine installation and delivery techniques, allowing the company to more efficiently deploy in the remaining zones around the city. Microtrenching is one of the tools SiFi uses as part of their FOCUS system of deployment.
“That was us,” says DCCN Coordinator Ben Carter. “They were telling us that they weren’t going to roll broadband out … Obviously, the business decision makes itself.” Rather than bringing a new service to a place where the largest population center was only around 12,000 in 2000, corporate Internet access companies were aiming for large cities such as Seattle and Portland.