Fiber optics, not magic beans: rural Idaho hopes for broadband stimulus | Reclaim the Media

Bruce Patterson is the one-man IT department for Ammon, a small town of 13,000 near Idaho Falls. He is fed up with companies overlooking the town when they discover the cost of Internet is prohibitive.

"There's a tremendous business in medical imaging and legal services in Idaho Falls, a city of 50,000 that has municipal fiber optic. But we can't attract any of those businesses," he said. "Metro areas are the dominant market for the big companies. A lot of communities are facing that we will be the last served." So three years ago, Ammon began planning a project to reach 4,500 unserved and underserved Internet users with a high-speed "virtual broadband gateway" run by the city...