Last week, FCC chairman Ajit Pai — infamous for axing the Net Neutrality rules late last year and no friend of open internet advocates — embarked on a four-state road trip of the Northwestern United States to highlight how high-speed broadband has the potential to create jobs and unlock economic opportunity. Along the way, he stopped in Ammon, Idaho, a city of about 15,000 in the southeastern part of the state that has gained some fame for pioneering a broadband network known as the “Ammon Model.”
The Ammon Model is many things to many people — city-owned broadband infrastructure; inexpensive, reliable internet; network virtualization. As Bruce Patterson, Ammon’s Technology Director succinctly puts it, the Ammon Model is about “democratizing critical infrastructure.” It is a city-owned broadband network that has built a virtual software layer to create a competitive marketplace for services, the most crucial being high-speed internet.
Posted 06/28/2018 by Garrett Brinker
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