Orem gets UTOPIA 'hookup'

OREM — Fiber by fiber, footprint by footprint, Orem City is getting closer to becoming a fully connected UTOPIA city.

The long, idyllic acronym — for Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency — is a statewide project that will enable each member of a community to be hooked up to a fast Internet, phone and video connection.

The first step is laying the foundation. Enter UTOPIA, the company that functions like a plumbing business, said chief operating officer Roger Black.

"We run pipes to the home and somebody else fills them up with a connection," he said.

Service companies like MStar, XMission, AT&T and Veracity then use those existing fiber-filled "pipes" to sell connections to residents, replacing their former phone and Internet providers.

In Orem, UTOPIA crews are finishing laying pipe for the last two "footprints," or neighborhoods, giving each house access to the super high-speed potential of fiber optic cables.

In the next month or so, Phase One of Orem's UTOPIA buildout will be complete with 15 footprints up and functioning, Black said.

The work may seem redundant for residents already using high-speed Internet or Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections but the benefits to fiber optics extend beyond mere data transmission, providers say.

XMission, one service provider, is developing a "triple-play package," which would allow residents to have one fiber-optic line to handle their Internet service, video service, such as cable television, and voice service, replacing the traditional phone line with the fiber-optic connection.

But what's so great about a fiber-optic phone line? It's cheaper.

A triple-play connection might start at around $100 a month, significantly less than the combined costs of a high-speed Internet connection, monthly cable fees and a monthly phone bill.

It's also the next step in technology.

"It's really the next generation of Internet connectivity," said Grant Sperry, XMission vice president of operations. "A lot of people might think, 'What can we do with 15 megabits? I'm happy with my 1.5 megabit DSL. ' What we encourage people to do is to think about maybe even five years ago. For a lot of people, dial-up was fine. Now, they can't imagine using anything other than cable or DSL. Fiberoptics makes so many other things possible."