Late last night a Fiber Optic cable between two islands was cut here in Hawaii that is causing massive disruption for users of  Time Warner Road Runner Internet service.  Road Runner did not have in place any redundant back haul, and customers statewide were without Internet service for many hours. When the service did come back on-line it is throttled to speeds that rival dial up days as you can see by the speed test I ran.

A very informed GNC reader told me tonight that they are in mass panic, because they are going to be hard pressed to keep services online at a level of service that customers demand and it could be a month or more before the fiber is fixed and service is fully restored to a level that is considered acceptable. He recommended I call other providers immediately, as their is going to a run on other service providers to get connected to something that resembles something other than dial up speeds.

The first question I am asking is how come Oceanic / Road Runner did not have a backup plan. If a single fiber optic line being damaged was enough to bring down the states internet infrastructure there is some gross negligence by Road Runner management here in Hawaii in my opinion, and someone should be held to account for this lack of basic planning.

This should not come as a surprise because basic bandwidth speeds have not increased here significantly in many years. We have waited and waited for promised increased speeds and it has never happened. This incident makes it very obvious that they do not have the infrastructure in place to handle increased speeds. If one fiber cable is damaged resulting in this massive decrease in available service it is obvious that they have not been investing in infrastructure . This should be a wake up call to Oceanic.

Wait times to talk to customer service representatives were endless. While the cutting of a Fiber optic line is bad, they should have realized we live in Hawaii and our nearest neighbor is 2500 miles away.  This slow down is going to cost Hawaii business owners literally 100’s of thousands of dollars.

I encourage Hawaii Road Runner customers to keep the heat on Oceanic / Time Warner. I do not feel sorry for them, they should have considered this as a possibility before, and had the back haul in place to keep us connected at acceptable speeds.