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Exactly. Telcom has approximately zero incentive to add capacity for any reason.
I tend to think they should be "required" to deploy service as a condition of their "monopoly" -- or at least forced to share their lines with a provider who actually wants to sell service. Same with Oceanic.
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I've noticed some house listings (in HPP) that say they have T1 or greater. One was on 5 and there's no TWC on 5. I know what a T1 line is, but I'm not sure these people do.
Puna: Our roosters crow first
Exede wild blue satellite is available and is high speed and high latency. It is about 12 Mb down and 3 Mb up with a 800 ms ping. You are capped at 25 GB a month and have to pay for any extra. It is about $120 a month plus installation and equipment purchase/leasing costs.
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Sounds almost like the area could really use a fixed wireless provider.
Might have to look at serious deployment in the area when I get over there.
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Yea I know they are over there. Met the guys at Aloha at a conference in Vegas, But it seems that they may not be deploying enough towers because not one person besides you mentioned them for service.
I dont know. I have been doing wireless Internet for nearly 20 years sold out and perhaps I should just stay out lol.
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Aloha broadband suffers from the same basic problem as every other provider: subscriber density is just too low.
It doesn't help that they're still trying to make it work with 802.11; the sub-GHz LTE bands are a much better fit for Puna terrain...
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Deployment of whitespace equipment would work wonders. Density of population is pretty high IMHO. I had to cover 15,000 square miles to cover 15,000 households.
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I freely admit that I don't know why there is such limited broadband availability on the island and within Puna specifically. If anyone does, please speak up.
Limited deployment of existing broadband solutions suggests that there is some limiting factor; perhaps it's not "subscriber density" (or maybe the density is only part of the problem). The reality is that neither Oceanic nor Telcom seem all that interested in bothering, and it's probably part of a longer-term play to migrate everyone to wireless, simply because wireless services are substantially less regulated.
As to the OP's requirement for "steady" high-speed: find a street with Oceanic, buy as many lots as necessary to run a small farm, jump through all the permit hoops for grid power, order cable, done. Wireless will suck sooner or later, and DSL is slow (if you can get it, which you can't). Don't buy property expecting the broaband to arrive someday; it's not happening.
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Due to a recent move within HPP I had to find a new provider. I had Hawaiian telcom previously. Cable is not available on my street either, so I am now using Aloha Broadband and I am very happy with the connection so far.
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I think the biggest hurdle for widespread broadband access here is spread out population base. In other words, there isn't much incentive for Oceanic Time Warner Cable, Hawaiian Telcom, or to a lesser extent, Sandwich Isles Communications to deploy faster speed tiers to all the remote fringes of this island.
For example, Hawaiian Telcom is spending large sums of capital to roll out FTTH service on Oahu. They're taking this step because the return on investment is much greater in Honolulu versus Puna.
http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/Hawaii-Bus...e-Changer/
