They were accusations that Comcast and Qwest denied, arguing they would provide those services when demanded by their customers but not before.

At its heart, Utopia's proponents and the network's telecommunications rivals were clashing - and continue to clash - over business strategies.

Utopia's proponents be- lieved, and still do, that as soon as its system becomes available, business and residential customers will eagerly flock to its fiber-to-the-home network, with its high-speed broadband connections.

Qwest, though, said it wasn't about to embark on a "Field of Dreams" strategy, a term that referred to the fantasy movie in which an Iowa farmer plows up his cornfield and builds a baseball diamond under the theory that if he builds it, fans and customers will come.

And so the clash continues.

Utopia's chairman Alex Jensen told the Centerville City Council last week that the "incumbent" telecommunications companies - Comcast and Qwest - were either unable to or did not have an interest in providing broadband services. "The need is still there," he said.

Jensen's statement, however, came just days after Jerry Fenn, Qwest's Utah president, announced that the company planned to invest millions of dollars as part of a $300 million companywide effort to beef up its Wasatch Front network by running fiber-optic lines to many of the neighborhoods it serves.

Fenn said Qwest's "fiber-the-node" technology will be available to more than 200,000 homes and businesses in Utah by the end of the year and offer speeds initially of up to 20 megabytes per second, and eventually 40 Mb/s.

Service providers on the fledgling Utopia network typically offer speeds of 15 Mb/s to 50 Mb/s, although much faster connections are possible.

"Just four years ago, hardly anyone would have thought it possible that we could achieve these kinds of speeds using our existing twisted copper pairs," Fenn said, describing technology that utilizes fiber-optic lines to neighbor nodes and copper lines from those connection points into nearby homes.

Comcast's system of "fiber-to-the-node" and coaxial cable - copper clad aluminium lines widely used by cable television companies - already is providing download speeds of up to 12 Mb/s. "And that's available to 700,000 Utah homes right now," Comcast's Utah spokesman Ray Child said.

But more importantly, Comcast this year will introduce new higher-speed technology over its nationwide network, he added. Known as DOCSIS 3.0, it will provide Internet users with connection speeds of up to 100 Mb/s through 2010 and the capability of exceeding 160 Mb/s not long after that.

"We haven't announced where we will be rolling out our DOCSIS 3.0 technology first, but Utah will be getting it," Child said.

Jesse Harris, who runs the freeutopia.org Web site and hopes to increase access to the Utopia network, argues that fiber optics will always be superior. And he points out that the speeds users of Comcast's technology actually achieve depend upon how many other users are using the node at the same time.

As additional users go online, "they keep having to split the node." He also argues that upload speeds are far slower than download speeds.

So on yet another level, for the proponents and critics of the Utopia system, it comes down to a clash of business ideology.

Utopia critic Royce Van Tassell of the Utah Taxpayers Association concedes that connecting fiber-optic lines to homes and businesses remains the touchstone of the telecommunications industry.

"No one is going to criticize the technology," Van Tassell said.

"The question is: Who is going to pay for it?"

steve@sltrib.com