Joe Pyrah

Feeding the pent-up demand for higher Internet speeds, Qwest Communications International Inc. is rolling out a broadband system nearly three times faster than its current offerings.

The new service will cost $99 on top of a paid phone line or $5-$15 more without one. In return, you can get speeds capable of downloading a two-hour movie in six minutes or 30 songs in one minute.

"We're very exited about fiber to the node, and we believe our customers will be excited," said Qwest spokesman Gary Younger.

"To the node" means that it still has to travel a short distance over copper lines to customers' homes. Some may require new equipment to take advantage of the speed.

While the service isn't available in Utah County yet, Younger said the company is rolling out the service through the rest of this year, with "more announcements soon."

The speed boost is available because of a $300 million company-wide effort to extend fiber optics to neighborhood nodes.

The announcement comes in the midst of hard questions regarding the municipally owned fiber projects UTOPIA and iProvo.

Those systems in some cases offer faster download speeds than even Qwest's new offerings and their future capacity remains substantially higher.

They also have faster upload speeds. The fiber systems typically offer the same upload speed as their download speeds. Younger says uploads via Qwest will remain at about 1 Mbps.

While the municipal systems may hold the lead in speed, they're struggling financially.

UTOPIA officials are asking their 11 cities to back millions of dollars in new bonds, and Provo leaders are trying to figure out how to stop their system from losing $2 million a year.