SANDY — Jaydene Washburn's rambler-style home here, 20 minutes south of Salt Lake City, seems the epitome of suburban tranquillity.
The neatly cropped lawn is free of weeds. The skis and bicycles are hung tidily in the garage. In the house, the walls are adorned with family photographs and religious images.
But look up at Washburn's roof and you notice a sign of one of the first great business battles of the 21st century: an antenna that reaches four feet above the shingles. Her family recently paid $400 to a startup called Utah Broadband to install the antenna because she was tired of waiting for the industry's major competitors, the telephone and cable companies, to provide high-speed, or broadband, Internet access.
Washburn, who teachers fourth grade, said she wanted to make the switch because her old dial-up access was excruciatingly slow when she tried to gain access to educational Web sites, when her sons played online games or when her husband sold refurbished golf clubs on eBay.
Like the building of the railroads in the 19th century and the development of the highway system in the 20th century, the wiring of America represents huge opportunities for companies large and small. To the winners will go monthly access fees from tens of millions of households and businesses.
The competition in the Salt Lake area mirrors that in towns and cities from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine. It pits behemoth cable companies against telephone companies, and both against a growing number of small entrepreneurs who want to use wireless technology to bypass the telecommunications infrastructure. All of the contenders are struggling to reach people like Washburn, knowing that whoever arrives first has an advantage.
About 14 percent of American households have broadband, amounting to a third of those with Internet access. They pay $30 to $60 a month for the service. Growth prospects for the market are strong, according to Patrick Mahoney, an analyst at the Yankee Group, a technology market research firm. Revenue from high-speed Internet service is expected to increase to $20.8 billion in 2007 from $7.4 billion in 2002, he said.
Technology industry analysts say high-speed computer links are being adopted more quickly than virtually any technology in American history. Still, other countries are ahead. The United State ranks 10th in the world in terms of the percentage of inhabitants with high-speed access, known as broadband behind Canada, South Korea and Japan.
The telephone companies have been criticized as being too slow in pursuing high-speed Internet customers. Cable has done better, notably Cox Communications and Time Warner, analysts said. The cable industry has spent some $80 billion to upgrade its systems for high-speed Internet access, including $10 billion this year, according to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group.
Cable's larger and faster investment is paying off. Nationally, according to the Yankee Group, 68 percent of households with broadband access use cable modems, while 31 percent use DSL, for digital subscriber line service, the telephone companies' competing product.
Figures are not available on the percentage of consumers who use broadband in the Salt Lake region, which is part of the 200-mile Wasatch Front. Some analysts say the percentage may be higher than average because of a strong emphasis on education. But in other ways, the Wasatch Front, which stretches the length of northern Utah, abutting the stunning mountain range, is typical of the challenges facing companies, as well as the desires and frustrations of consumers.
In countries like South Korea and Japan, high-speed Internet service is aided by densely populated urban settings. But the communities in the Salt Lake region, like those in much of the United States, are relatively spread out. To connect them means doing something that is labor-intensive: putting a lot of new holes in the ground.
Evidence of the cable industry's investment is the Comcast construction site, a network hub just off I-15, on a dusty spot 15 minutes south of Salt Lake City just behind the parking lot of the Flying J gas station.
Technicians in hard hats work around the clock at the site, deploying a crucial component of broadband access: fiber-optic lines, which carry high-speed Internet access over blips of light. The company is laying 1,500 miles of new lines, part of the multimillion-dollar upgrade of its Salt Lake City network.
Once they place the lines, they must connect them to create a seamless network. Technicians work in 12-hour shifts to splice the fragile glass lines together with a $35,000 machine called a fusion splicer.
Comcast has completed similar upgrades at 30 other hub sites along the 200-mile Wasatch Front, and it plans to upgrade an additional seven sites. Comcast now makes broadband available to 80 percent of the region's population, and it expects to be at 90 percent by year-end, including the neighborhood in Sandy where Washburn lives.
The company is completing a $110 million investment in the region. Gary Waterfield, area vice president for Comcast, said the company's investment should have a big payoff, given the demand for broadband in Utah. The company charges $52.99 a month for Internet access, plus a $3-a-month modem lease; the price drops to $42.95 a month for people who order cable television service, too.
"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.
Within those states, it contracts with Internet service providers, which resell Qwest's service under their own brand names.
One customer is Matt Duhamel, who recently moved to the Salt Lake area from Idaho. Until recently, he couldn't get broadband at his Pinnacle Highland apartment, and found the situation "quite irritating." As soon as DSL became available, he signed up. He likes the service, but isn't keen on spending $60 a month. The trouble is, he doesn't have much choice.
"As soon as Comcast gets here, I'll probably see which is cheaper," he said.
The relative merits of DSL and cable modem service are the subject of some debate, but industry analysts say customer satisfaction is generally high with both.
Yet some people can't get either one. They have paved the way for a new breed: the wireless entrepreneurs — people like Steven McGhie, who are unlikely to overtake established telecommunications companies but are eager to give them a run for the money.
"If I had the capital, I could take these guys on no problem," said McGhie, 36, who started his wireless Internet provider, Utah Broadband, last year. The company serves Washburn and several hundred other local customers, who pay $39.95 a month and up for service.
McGhie, who lives in Sandy, started with humble aspirations. "I was frustrated because there was no high-speed access," he said. He set up a system, figuring that he could sell access to his neighbors because "there are a lot of other people in my boat."
Washburn was eager to listen to his sales pitch because using the Internet over regular phone lines was slow, and often unreliable, when she tried to download larger files like pictures.
"I tried to e-mail a picture to my daughter at college the other day, and it never did go. I got disconnected," Washburn said. "That was the last straw."
As a result, McGhie was up on the Washburns' roof, attaching an antenna and trying to avoid one of the great hazards of wireless access in Utah: the trees, notably the quaking aspens. For the antenna to send and receive signals to the Internet, it must have a clear line of sight to an antenna tower a mile away on the ridge. There can be no intervening trees or even shrubbery.
The limitations of radio frequency technology are one reason wireless access has been slow to catch on. Another is the cost of installation. The Motorola antenna that McGhie is installing costs around $400, but he said most customers considered that price worthwhile.
Washburn agreed. "It's been wonderful," she said. "My husband's been on eBay; my sons have been playing games. One son had a research report on owls, and he got stuff off the Internet for that, too."
McGhie runs his business on his own, with help from contractors; he works out of the home he shares with his wife and five children. He is one of 65 wireless competitors in the region, according to Comcast. Nationally, there are around 1,800 wireless Internet access providers, called Wisps, said Robert Hoskins, publisher of Broadband Wireless Exchange, an online magazine focusing on the wireless Internet industry.
"There's still a huge pent-up demand from people who do not have DSL or cable modem in their neighborhoods," Hoskins said. A typical wireless Internet service provider, he said, has 10 to 20 employees and 300 to 500 customers; most of the activity is in suburbs with affluent neighborhoods.
But there are larger wireless competitors in his area. One is Broadband Solutions, which serves 800 residential clients and 600 businesses along the Wasatch Front. The business customers pay $110 to $500 a month, depending on the access speed, which is sometimes less than that of comparable service from the telephone company. (The cable industry has not traditionally focused on the business market, but is increasingly catering to small and medium-sized companies.) The cost of installation, with a two-year agreement, is around $50.
One customer is the American Express satellite office in Salt Lake City, which pays $225 a month for Internet access at 512 kilobits per second, about double the speed of residential DSL.
Marianne Buie, the office manager, says service has been so good that she would like wireless at home. But she can't have it, because the antenna would be blocked by the surrounding oak trees. And she cannot get broadband from anyone else, even though she lives near downtown Salt Lake City.
It's frustrating, she said, because dial-up access is slow, particularly when she is trying to download or send pictures, or when her husband is downloading upgrades for his handheld organizer.
"I'm waiting for Comcast, or anyone who comes to my neighborhood," Buie said. "I'll go with whoever gets there first."