I switched from Hawaiian Telcom DSL back to Oceanic Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner on Tuesday for peace of mind. I’ve had several service related issues due to the poor inside wiring at my house. The latter issue reared its ugly head over the weekend. I would lose my connection whenever my parents received or made a phone call. In addition, my upload speed was half of what it was supposed to be.
Hawaiian Telcom installed a NID filter on the outside network interface to eliminate any problems with the inside wiring. However, this band-aid solution was unraveling before my eyes.
I made a service call on Monday to have a technician figure out the problem. Nonetheless, I decided to cut my losses and switch Internet providers. Hawaiian Telcom was going to bill me if the inside wiring was the culprit (which likely was the problem).
Road Runner seemed to be a better option on the other hand. Oceanic ran a dedicated coaxial cable to my room from the outside network interface before I originally had this service in 2000. So, I figured Road Runner would be a hell of a lot more reliable than Hawaiian Telcom’s DSL.
I had some funny/interesting observations from this switchover:
1. The Hawaiian Telcom’s account retention representative desperately tried to keep me as a DSL customer. He offered me free DSL for three months. In addition, the representative offered to waive all the inside wiring repair charges.
2. The employee at Oceanic’s Kona office forgot to give me my e-mail account information. So, I had to talk to a surly Oceanic customer service representative to get this information.
3. Oceanic’s DNS servers are pure crap. I had a lot of difficulty accessing websites through their DNS servers. However, this problem went away when I switched to a free, publicly accessible DNS service.
4. Web pages seem to load faster on Road Runner versus Hawaiian Telcom’s DSL.
Lastly, I sent my DSL modem back to Hawaiian Telcom using the box Road Runner gave me.
September 30th, 2010 at 8:55 PM
Well I sure hope you have better luck with Road Runner then I have.
Dedicated line to your room??? Sounds nice!
I have a dedicated line to our house that get’s split… but still I know that Oceanic/Road Runner is short changing many Puna residents right now.
I’m tired of getting kicked off line and having to save things every few minutes just to make sure I don’t get kicked off.
PUNA is having problems…. at least on my hub.
October 1st, 2010 at 1:59 PM
It’s interesting that you should mention the DNS servers with RoadRunner. I have a tendency to type too quickly so I’ll make a mistake entering a domain name and RoadRunner has that nifty little feature of “helping you” by redirecting invalid domains to an ad supported search page instead of just the browser error page. Their DNS servers in general are a little shaky, even for the business class customers and they’re probably a bit overloaded on the residential service. I do the same thing, point my LAN to a few of the public servers and use one of Univ. Hawaii’s as my secondary. That seems to work well. Hope the cable works out for you. Last I was in Kona, some of the nodes are getting pretty heavy usage and were getting kind of slow.
October 10th, 2010 at 7:58 AM
If you had run a dedicated cat-5 wire to your router instead the DSL would work fine cause of the filter outside. It is not a band aid but required to bleed out frequency. Road Runner shares band with with your neighbors.
October 10th, 2010 at 10:24 AM
HawTel would’ve charged an installation fee if I had them run a dedicated cable to my room. However, I already had a dedicated coaxial cable into my room for Road Runner. So, I decided to switch to avoid paying additional installation fees.