WEST VALLEY CITY — In the E Center on Monday, a Utah Valley State College aviation instructor operated a flight simulation program on a giant computer screen. "Flying" behind his jet plane was a plane being piloted by a UVSC student working at a flight simulator miles away in Orem.

Next to the instructor, two UVSC students raced cars in a Microsoft Xbox video game. The gamers they were racing against were nowhere near the E Center, though — they, too, were interacting via the Internet.

The entire room, full of what was termed the Utah Valley Experimental Computer Lab, was connected to the outside world by one thin fiber-optic cable. So as one student carried out remote-controlled electronics experiments and the aviation teacher sent comments to his student pilot, it was all done — in high-speed real time — thanks to the E Center and UVSC's connections to the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency.

The display was part of the Broadband Cities 2005 conference, which opened Monday at the E Center and will run through Wednesday. The conference, chaired this year by UTOPIA executive Paul Morris, brought about 500 community and business leaders — many of them from outside the United States — to West Valley to learn how cities and communities worldwide are connecting their residents and businesses to the information superhighway.

"The U.S. really lags behind in this technology," UTOPIA spokeswoman Maura Carabello said. UTOPIA is a relatively recent — and sometimes controversial — partnership between city governments and the private sector. It seeks to lay a fiber-optic infrastructure and offer service providers to allow those in member cities to use the Internet and send and receive video and other data at ever-higher speeds.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. opened the conference with a real-time question-and-answer session with a group of Orem elementary school students. Morris gave his opening remarks from home, appearing thanks to a Web camera and high-speed Internet.

The UVSC display sought to showcase how technology like that being used by UTOPIA and the smaller iProvo project can aid in education. Technology Dean Tom McFarland said UVSC has the largest aviation training program of any university in the country, but some students — many of them in southern Utah — don't have access to flight-simulation time because of cost and distance.

"We're trying to find inexpensive ways to do this advanced training," he said.

He envisions a day — in the near future — when a far-away student can sit in front of his home computer and log flight-simulation hours under the watchful eye of an instructor hundreds of miles away.