Now that about a week has passed since we had our broadband scare here in Hawaii when a Fiber Cable between two islands was cut, it got me to thinking about all the things we are missing out in here in the land of Paradise.
We have no real competition to Road Runner, several ISP’s offer DSL but their is no high speed competition to Road Runner.
Verizon only has a Federal Business presence here, and does not to my knowledge have plans to offer FIOS here.
Clearwire is here with 4G, but its not much better than DSL for speed.
So the question I keep asking Oceanic Cable, the Time Warner / Road Runner affiliate is when do we get DOCSIS 3.0 and the long awaited upgrade in speed? I have been here in Hawaii now going on 14 years, and the cable service has only barely improved from the days when I first signed up for service. My understanding is that their is no plans to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 to the islands of Hawaii anytime soon while Time Warner in the lower 48 has been deploying it at a snails pace.
The potential answers to why they have been so slow in rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 is simple, no competition. There is no pressure from competitors to upgrade or improve the service. Another reason could be that they have not invested enough into the infrastructure over the past few years to support the upgrade and are simply dragging their feet because not enough people are demanding it.
I would gladly pay for more speed, but the increment increase has to be on both the download and upload speed. Like 10’s of thousands of other customers here in Hawaii, we better get used to waiting because I have a feeling DOCSIS 3.0 will be delivered on Unionized Hawaiian Time.
We have problems like that on the mainland too. Where I live Time Warner is the only viable game in town and as a result we get mediocre speeds and service. I can’t even get DSL where I live even if I wanted to switch.