Faster Internet… Finally!

By Cody in Successes, Challenges

For those of you who don’t know (that is, everyone), Sakuzaku is stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the island of Oahu. In terms of weather, recreational activities, unbridled natural majestic beauty, hula supplies, and ra-in-bo-ws, it’s an unparalleled place to be. In terms of high-speed internet, it’s like living in a repelling drainage cesspit.

Oceanic Time Warner is the de-facto ISP here in the islands, with their own brand of Road Runner offered for $44.95/month. That considerable sum buys us what they advertise as 5Mbps downstream, 512kbps up. As pathetic as that sounds compared to Verizon’s new FiOS on the mainland, we take what we can get. That said, though, it doesn’t even live up to it’s promise — rarely if ever do you get download speeds faster than 200Kbps. Upstream bandwidth is a joke. Accessing a server in your apartment is as fun as sawing off your own arm. (Note: Sakuzaku does NOT run a server in our apartment. That, of course, would violate the Time Warner terms of service.) This doesn’t even mention (except, now, it does, since I’m mentioning it) the fact that it took Time Warner literally six weeks to send out a guy to test the line and hand me a cable modem (and attempt to install Time Warner’s specially-branded version of Internet Explorer on my Powermac). And the joy of 40 minute wait times to talk to their customer service, even at 10 o’clock at night.

When Sakuzaku first arrived here the only alternative was Hawaiian Telecom DSL, available for substantially the same price as Road Runner, but with the added caveat that you had to have local phone service, amounting to an additional $20/month. That brought the total cost of DSL to something like $65/month — even less of a deal.

After spending nearly a year shuttling back and forth between Honolulu and Tokyo, I grew more and more envious of their 100Mbps fiber connections to the home for ridiculously low prices. I bided my time.

Lo and behold, while reading an article on Engadget a few days ago, what did I see at the bottom of the post, but an advertisement for Hawaiian Telecom’s new residential high speed internet service. 11Mbps?! No. 1Mbps up?!?!? NO… WAY.

Well, it is true. The Internet told me so. According to a Honolulu Advertiser story, this new service was just rolled out. And I just called and signed up. Ah, the advantages to living in a major metropolitan area — we are within the 6,000 wireline feet required to get the 11Mbps service.

Not only is it way faster, but they’ve eliminated the silly local phone service requirement (who has a home phone anymore — what is this, 2003?). That makes it only $10/month more expensive than Road Runner (well worth it). And perhaps even more importantly, this has spurred us to get rid of our cable altogether — a good move in any case.

Sakuzaku is soon to be one of the first customers in Honolulu with 11Mbps service. Yes!