The American city with the most sophisticated fiber network is Ammon, Idaho, population 16,500. The city offers residents performance, pricing, and options that inhabitants of a metropolis dominated by one or two internet service providers can only dream of. Ammon is a true local network, where residents own the fiber and providers compete to serve them. “If you were to ask me what the key component of Ammon is, I would say it’s a broadband infrastructure as a utility,” says Bruce Patterson, Ammon’s technology director and one of the key drivers behind the network. “We’ve just found a way to make it a true public infrastructure, like a road.” 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. Patterson describes four ways in which Ammon’s model is superior to other existing networks.

Sen Tina Smith (D-MN) hosted a roundtable discussion in Granite Falls (MN) with local leaders and rural community advocates in an attempt to get to the root of rural needs in the broadband game. Sen Smith previously introduced the Revitalizing Underdeveloped Rural Areas and Lands Act (RURAL Act) to aid cooperatives impacted by new tax codes to retain their ability to get broadband implementation grants without affecting their tax-exempt status. “I want to understand better how I and the federal government can be a good partner with you as we work to expand broadband in small towns and rural areas.” Sen Smith detailed her understanding of the negative impacts of insufficient or nonexistent broadband access. “If you don’t have access to broadband you can’t get your homework done, you can’t work remotely for your job, your healthcare systems don’t work, you have trouble recruiting people into your community.” Her focus as of late is combating and correcting false data on where broadband actually exists. “We have a federal government pushing out a significant amount of money but sometimes it’s pushing out that money based on maps that are not at all accurate about where there is coverage, or there is coverage but it’s pitiful. It’s a few drops of water coming out of a pipe. It doesn’t begin to meet the needs of the community.” Sen Smith was quick to point out that even though Minnesota broadband coverage maps makes it appear most households are serviced “there are still 145,000 households that don’t have it, that doesn’t even count the households sitting at the end of the pipe with a few drops, not able to do what they need to do.”