Hawaiian TelcomReviews of hawaiiantel.com

For a communications company, Hawaiian Telcom surely lacks that trait. I had an installation scheduled in November and no one showed up. I took from work just to sit at home and wait for nothing. Called back to reschedule for a Saturday appointment on Jan 6tth. On Jan 3rd, I called back to reschedule again because I got scheduled to work on Jan 6th. Low and behold, installer still showed up. Told him I called on Wednesday and rescheduled installation for the wed 1/24 because I had to work. Fast forward to today, installation is never going to happen. Called customer service ti confirm appointment for today and they inform no appointment is scheduled for today. I give up and will just stick with Spectrum.

The Internet service itself is great. I had DSL for a dozen years with very few outages or network issues. Switched to their fiber recently and again, it's an outstanding product. Where they utterly fail is in customer service. They will make some sort of mistake on just about every service change or interaction. You need to record any phone calls with them because they apparently have no ticketing system. One hand does not know what the other is doing. They won't reply to support requests through their online portal. The technical support when you do reach someone on the phone is outsourced and not very skilled. The customer service reps are friendly but incompetent. Thank Pele that they have great network engineers though!

Hawaiian Telcom is deceptive when it comes to their internet services. We did a triple play: landline, basic TV, and 500 Mbps internet. We had been longtime landline customers prior to signing up for the triple play. Upon signing up, I was informed that I would be having 1 Gbps of fiber optic internet service for my first year at no extra charge. Hawaiian Telcom uses IPTV technology for their TV service. This means the set-top box needed to be connected to an IPTV-compatible router via ethernet. Because we bundled with TV, we were coerced into renting their godawful Zyxel gateway. I had been under the impression that the Zyxel gateway was a modem-router combo because that is what I'm used to seeing with cable. I barely topped at 580 Mbps during the one year of "1 Gbps" service. Hawaiian Telcom didn't do anything about it. We had been wasting $9.99 per month renting that crap gateway. I later realized that the optical network terminal (ONT) takes the place of the modem when it comes to fiber optic. I was getting 200-350 Mbps in speeds during the majority of the time. After the one year period on "1 Gbps," I was downgraded to the 500 Mbps service. Shortly before recently switching to Spectrum, I purchased an ASUS RT-AXE7800 Wi-Fi 6E router, which is IPTV compatible. I enabled multicast forwarding in the IPTV settings, and I was able to get the set-top box working. I was getting much faster speeds with this router and realized then that the Zyxel gateway had been bottlenecking the gigabit speeds that I'm supposedly paying for!!! Seriously?!?!?! Not to mention, Hawaiian Telcom uses old-generation TV technology and doesn't have direct live streaming options like Spectrum does. Their bottlenecking gateway and subprime TV service had prompted me to switch back to Spectrum. I'm currently subscribed to Spectrum Internet Ultra, which delivers 500 Mbps in download and 20 Mbps in upload speeds. I'm tempted to upgrade to gigabit for an additional $30 per month with them because I want to make up for not being able to enjoy gigabit with Hawaiian Telcom all thanks to their crap equipment!!! Also, Spectrum no longer requires TV customers to rent a set-top box as long as they have Spectrum Internet service. So my household has been streaming Spectrum TV on mobile devices, smart TVs, and Roku sticks since. My house has way less clutter now compared to when we had Hawaiian Telcom's lackluster equipment taking up our space in the house previously. The crap that Hawaiian Telcom put me through was pathetic. I've been wanting to try gigabit speeds. I've been overpaying for lackluster performance and reliability the whole time!!! Here's another note - Hawaiian Telcom is not truly a local business, despite its name. Hawaiian Telcom was owned by Cincinnati Bell during the time I signed up for their triple play service, and as of 2023, they're owned by an Australian-based infrastructure investment firm. Not local at all! At least Spectrum is American and that their customer service is 100% U.S.-based!

Our original review was for Hawaii Telecom's landline service which was awful at the time, you can read it below. We've since signed up for their OpticFiber service which finally became available, and it seems a lot of the original problems with Hawaii Telecom have been resolved. I will leave the old review below so it's clear what our original review was for. Old review: (12/31/2022) The basic landline service didn't work, we paid for unlimited calls Nationwide and the service didn't work when we called any landline in Hawaii. Any calls into support didn't resolve any of the issues. We never got reimbursed by Hawaiian Telecom for the non-working service nor ever got it fixed so we just ported our number out to another service.

I switched to Hawaii Telcom after they advertised fantastic new 300 mbps fiber internet on the big island. Unfortunately what they didn't mention was obvious data throttling on youtube. Its so bad lol. They likely over-sold in an attempt to compete with Google's new fiber system that's been taking over and they took some shortcuts in their server department.

Unreliable! I call Hawaiian Telcom twice to report an unsafe panel on our street. People are falling and bumping into it. I left my phone number and contact info and did not receive a callback and they never came out to inspect the issue. Poor customer service.