Hawaiian Telcom Arvostelua 15

Worst experience ever. What a load of shit this company is. Our fiber optic line snapped and they could give 2 fcks about it. We have been out of Internet for over a week and there was absolutely no urgency to get it turned back on. My wife has lost over a week of work because shee works from home and these scumbags wanted to credit us 60 dollars. We will be filing a lawsuit against these lazy scumbags.

Worst internet company EVER. 6 months of service and it’s NOT been working more than it has. I’m on the phone with them weekly.

Their support is nonexistent, as many others have mentioned. Its hours on the phone, and then if they call you back they use a pre-recorded japanese message and immediately hang up. Then you call back, and they say call back later. This happens over days and days. The chatbot online can never get you a live agent to help either. So that all 3 support models not working at all. We havent had the internet router work for months, and gave up and got spectrum. This is for DSL too. Can get the Hawaiian Telcom to fix or turn off the service. This should be a class action lawsuit.

This is a message to the security operations team at your company, invest in better security! there is a hacker out here claiming your alias using other domains names. I have reported it but you as a company need to invest in better security.

This is the WORST in all of Hawaii for an kind of customer support. Once these clowns have your money they just don't care.
They CHARGE you pay them unless you send a check.
It's damn near impossible to get a human being to talk to you.
It took me an hour and half to pay an overdue bill (overdue because I could never get a hold of anyone there) and to cancel my service.
I thought SPECTRUM was bad - these guys make SPECTRUM look like customer service heroes.
Hawaiian Telecom takes yo for granted - avoid doing business with them if you can.
AND,this from a born and raised local guy who tries hard to do business with local company's.

I called 611 to request a technician to resolve my internet/WiFi problems. It took 58 minutes to finally schedule a date. The service rep had a very poor skill of English and I requested to speak someone that speaks & understand English. She could not comprehend this simple communication. This was quite irritating and she certainly tried her best to switch to Spectrum.

Horrible business practices. When I tried to resolve a problem, they shuffled me from one person to another, and it took so much time without resolution… the billing kept increasing. Executive DanaW wrote “ I apologize to hear of your continued frustration.”. Deterred the focus… she should have apologized for their inability to correct or resolve the issues!!! They don’t acknowledge their disabilities so it continues to promote 👎👎. They need some better business lessons!

Fiber (NOT) ready for prime time

If you have the following: Land line, PV system, security cameras, alarm system, fax machine, you really need to read this. Had a Hawaiian Telcom sales rep come to the door late February selling high speed fiber. The price was great, for 1 Gig half the price of "S" at 300Mbbs. Sign me up. Installers came out about a week later and said that the cable would be attached to the outside of the house, say what! That would mean that the entry point would be at one end of the house and termination would be at the other after they drilled through the wall. Asked why it couldn't be installed in the attic as the phone line was, was told they didn't do that anymore. So, I ended up contracting with a local electrician to install the cable inside the house, should have backed out then. HI Tel came back and installed the fiber, initially all looked good, have never seen such speeds. Changed the networks on the TV, iPad, computers all looked good. Two hours later, was talking on the land line and the phone went dead, tried calling my friend back and the call was diverted to HI Tel, whoever I called, it went to HI Tel, tried calling my own number and it said the number was out of order. So, I called Hawaiian Telcom support, you'll soon learn that the company should be named after another country. Called three times, waited hours to be told the problem was my phone, to I'll be right back, never came back. Finally, someone gave me a ticket number and someone would come out. LOL at this point? Received a call telling me that fiber and copper cannot exist on the same line and that it would have to be converted to fiber (both operate on different voltages). OK, now my phone works. On Easter Sunday, we had a short power outage. Did you know that when you have an outage, your fiber phone goes down (unlike copper) that's why they try and sell you battery backup for your phone. Anyway, when that blip happened the alarm went off, ugh. The alarm company said they had a failure to communicate, line was down. Remember the (both operate on different voltages). Was unable to resolve the issue. Called Hi Tel support again. No one came out, but did receive a call at 7:51PM by a woman named "Uh"? (that's what she said). She wanted me to debug the issue, I said someone needed to come out. She argued with me if I wanted it fixed. She said I need to accept technology change (regarding the copper); I wasn't happy with that. Never said she was sorry about all the problems we were having, just went on talking over me. Finally got confirmation that a tech would be out the next day. A local young man showed up, first nice person we delt with. First thing out of mouth was "sorry you're having so much trouble" He did his troubleshooting and finally said that thy could install a separate copper line but couldn't change the fiber back. (shaking your head yet) And by the way, cameras and PV system still down. Solution, dump Hawaiian Tel completely and go back to company "S" All is back up except the alarm system, it's being upgraded to wireless. The moral of the story is, you can sell a Ferrari to a farmer, but what's going to do with it.

Hawaiian Telcom canceled my phone service. That was my fault for forgetting to pay for a couple of months.

So, I set up a new account with upgraded services because they begged me to reapply and they offered upgraded wifi and fiber optics at a much lower rate, almost half of what used to pay before.

Two months later, I get an automatic charge to my checking account in the amount of the old monthly fee amount!

I called Hawaiian Telcom to ask them why my cancelled account is charging me and found out I was supposed to return the router for my old phone service.

First of all, they never notified me that I had to return the router for the old account.

Not when I spoke to customer service when they were begging me to open a new account at a reduced the cost.

Not when the technician came to install my new upgraded service.

No email, nothing asking me to return the router or else I will get charged!

I have no problem returning the router. My point is, I’d like them to notify me and give me time after that, to return it.

The funds in my bank account was for another payment that now may bounce or get charged a late fee.

I authorized Hawaiian Telcom to charge my new account but they’re saying the are unable to reverse the charge to my old account or put the charges towards my new account.

They told me I have to cancel the payment at my bank, Bank of Hawaii.

Well, I contacted Bank of Hawaii and they can’t cancel a payment once it goes through, even if it’s still pending. They put in a dispute for me instead. So disappointing.

So I called Hawaiian Telcom back to see if they can go a step further to help me resolve my issue and all I received was a, “Sorry…”

They just won’t try to work with me to resolve this issue.

I have been in the service industry for almost 30 years!

The place I currently work gets charges reversed for customers all the time.
Same for the market or department store. I think Amazon has the best refund policy! If you didn’t get the product, they issue a refund right away!
I am not refusing to pay, just charge my other account or another way of paying. I need the funds back in my bank account.

If I knew I might have to pay, I would’ve returned it as soon as possible.

They could have issued the return label with a letter, some kind of notification!

If they had a service counter like they had before, I would’ve made arrangements to be there this week!

I don’t appreciate the less than adequate service!

I’m highly considering cancelling my service with them!

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.