Categories: TECHNOLOGY

Internet in Honolulu, Hawaii: DSL VS. Cable

With over forty internet service providers in the Honolulu yellow pages, there is no one stop comprehensive ISP directory comparing wireless, cable and DSL. The best un-biased free online comparison is at GeoQuote, where the search engine has a choice of residential or business internet connections. Enter your telephone and address and the interactive search engine will give you a customized table for you.

Prices and special deals change all the time and GeoQuote will show up to date dynamic pricing. A static table of 2007 price versus speed for Honolulu is available. In downtown Honolulu, there are numerous free wireless hot-spots and all of Chinatown has free Wi-Fi.

FiOS is fiber-optics all the way to your house where an optical network terminal (ONT) capable of delivering television and outstripping cable speed of 15 Mbps. Investments upgrading the infrastructure is currently under way avert a world wide Internet gridlock in the coming years but fiber to the home availability is limited.

This article is a personal story and experience of internet speed and customer service comparison between Oceanic Road Runner and Hawaiian Telcom DSL. Having just recently switched over from cable to DSL on 11/18/2007, was able to compare true speed differences from Chinatown.

Although Oceanic advertised speeds exceeds DSL, that measurement is only from your location on Oahu to Road Runner headquarters in Mililani. It’s not false advertising, it’s just only island wide and does not reflect normal usage of worldwide web surfing. The time it takes to go to Kathmandu is the same for cable and DSL.

Road Runner will only allow Oceanic cable customers to use the Mililani speed test at Oceanic. If not a customer, the link will automatically redirect you. See the table comparing between Oceanic Cable versus Hawaiian Telcom on the same PC to four different speed testers, Speed Test, Bandwidth Place, dslReports, and Wugnet.

Oceanic’s monolithic customer service phone answering system allows you to leave your name and number and they will call you back within a designated time. The Oceanic convenience center in Sears at the Ala Moana Mall has a number system so don’t have to stand while waiting to receive customer service. Fifteen minutes of waiting is not that much compared to travel time to enter what used to be the largest mall in the world.

All these wonderful customer experiences are lacking in the Hawaiian Telcom customer service, who has a person answering the phone without long waiting. There is no installation fee with Hawaiian Telcom DSL because there is no technician required to be sent to your location and set up your connection. Time Warner Oceanic Cable charges $70 for internet cable installation.

NeoTrace is a user friendly trace route program with reverse DNS and Whois lookups. The screen shot of Hawai’i to Kathmandu with a response time of about 760 milliseconds for both Oceanic cable and Hawaiian Telcom DSL was made with NeoTrace.