Pleasantville, Utah County.

• Author: HESS, TERESA BROWNING
• Position: Brief Article

What Steve Christensen calls the "millennial master planned community" is expected to take up to 25 years to complete, and if all goes as planned, Traverse Mountain will eclipse Lehi city in size.

MASTER PLANNED COMMUNITIES -- places where people can live, work, shop and be entertained without leaving the confines of their neighborhoods -- have emerged as the new darlings of city planners throughout the country. Moving away from urban sprawl and the cookie-cutter homogeneity that has robbed many cities of their character, "new urbanism' faces the daunting task of curbing a national passion -- the great American love of automobiles.

The developers of one of the largest planned communities undertaken in Utah, a 3,000-acre tract in Lehi dubbed Traverse Mountain, are betting that a high-tech corporate park will be the cornerstone of their attempt to create a self-contained environment for living. The ultra-fast data connections and network capabilities of the new Triumph Technology Park will attract office tenants and community residents, proving a common link between the physical and virtual worlds of business and home.

Building on phase one of Triumph's Technology Park, including some 200,000 square feet of office space, began in January. Developer Steve Christensen says the project, envisioned as eventually containing more than four million square feet of mixed-use offices, will feature the most technologically advanced features available in the market today.

A gigabyte Ethernet fiber optic network will provide data and Internet connections that are up to 1,000 times faster than business digital subscriber lines (DSL), according to Christensen. The park will also offer multiple Internet backbones and telephone networks as well as bandwidth by the slice to handle voice, video and data networking. An in-house information technology services staff will provide tenants with a "plug-and-go office" option for complete management and repair of servers, switches, routers, PCs, printers, phones, voice mail, e-mail and websites.

The broadband connectivity that Triumph's data center provides office tenants will also be available to every home in Traverse Mountain, along with a community intranet to keep residents informed of daily and weekly specials at retailers and restaurants within the development. The developers view technology as the bridge between commerce and community that will help bind the project as a cohesive whole -- ambitious plans for...