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.