"High-speed access is hugely popular here," Waterfield said. "There are very large families in Utah. Nobody wants to be in line for the computer while someone is using the phone line" for dial-up access.

"People are downloading more music, playing more games and sharing family photos — they want more bandwidth," he said.

Comcast is running a campaign to market its services to local residents and businesses. It features "Stan the Cable Man," a big guy whose bearded face on advertisements urges residents to sign up for television and Internet in one fell swoop.

The idea is to keep customers out of the hands of the competition, notably the telephone industry, which is working on its own upgrade in the region. Just a few freeway exits away from the cable work, a telephone strategy is being guided by Steven Glatt and Jim Thomas, two managers for the region's dominant local phone company, Qwest.

The broadband opportunity comes at a tough time for Qwest and other phone companies. Faced with falling phone rates and new competition from long-distance companies, they have in some cases been too preoccupied to make major investments in their high-speed infrastructure.

Matt Rotter, vice president for product management at Qwest, said the company had slowed its broadband efforts over the last two years to deal with other issues.

"We jumped out of the gate early," Rotter said. "Then we had a slowdown the last year or two while we worked on other priorities." Its DSL service is available to only 60 percent of the Salt Lake region, he said, but he added that the company was working to change that.

Thomas, director of network operations for Qwest in Utah, said his company had changed its tune and wanted full-out deployment. "They tell me: 'Tell us where you want to deploy. We'll give the resources,' " Thomas said.

He is standing beside a small corrugated-metal shed outside the Pinnacle Highland apartment complex, just south of Salt Lake City. The shed is called a remote terminal, and despite its decidedly low-tech exterior, it houses major-league electronic brains that can connect the apartments — and conceivably, surrounding neighborhoods — with high-speed access.

Qwest is building 50 remote terminals in Utah, at $17,000 to $58,000 each. The company must make such investments because its existing network, built largely on copper, is capable of delivering high-speed access only over short distances from the central offices. These remote terminals serve as mini-central offices that carry the signals to outlying neighborhoods.

Last April, Qwest committed to spending $100 million in 12 months to upgrade its system in its 14-state region.