HawTel to offer naked DSL and faster downloads

In today’s Hon­olulu Adver­tiser, a story revealed Hawai­ian Telcom’s plans to sell DSL accounts with­out a tra­di­tional voice land­line. In the indus­try, this is called naked DSL, and it has been avail­able from Haw­Tel since July.

It’s another attempt to recap­ture for­mer Haw­Tel cus­tomers while the company’s upcom­ing IPTV ser­vice lan­guishes in test­ing. Many house­holds have switched off their Haw­Tel land­lines, elim­i­nat­ing them from HawTel’s cur­rent DSL service.

These res­i­den­tial cus­tomers rely on cell phones for their voice ser­vice. Oceanic Time Warner has cap­tured many of the res­i­den­tial Inter­net cus­tomers statewide, while Clear­wire is mak­ing some gains in Honolulu.

A baf­fling enroll­ment process

Cus­tomers who don’t have a land­line will have to call Hawai­ian Tel to get their naked DSL, as the cur­rent signup page asks users to enter their land­line phone num­ber. Wouldn’t Haw­Tel want to make the signup process as easy as pos­si­ble for cus­tomers who don’t have a land­line, espe­cially after HawTel’s poor per­for­mance in answer­ing cus­tomer ser­vice calls dur­ing 2006?

Based on CEO Mike Ruley’s com­ments in today’s arti­cle, Haw­Tel man­age­ment wants to take advan­tage of recent reports that rated HawTel’s DSL at a faster speed than Oceanic Time Warner’s Road Run­ner ser­vice. Haw­Tel plans to increase its down­load speeds to peaks of 7 t0 11 mbps next month, with upload speeds of up to 1 mbps. This is assy­met­ric DSL, which is suit­able for home ser­vice. it’s not a good choice for busi­nesses. These are faster speeds than Oceanic Time Warner’s cur­rent res­i­den­tial ser­vice. How­ever, Time Warner offers a turbo option for some main­land cus­tomers that offers com­pa­ra­ble speeds to HawTel’s new levels.

TV through your landline

HawTel’s IPTV ser­vice will need the faster con­nec­tions, espe­cially as con­sumers demand more HDTV chan­nels. Haw­Tel could sell cus­tomers a bun­dle that includes DSL, TV and voice ser­vices. Oceanic Time Warner has been sell­ing a sim­i­lar bun­dle in Hawaii for the last 2 years. Cus­tomer lock-in is eas­ier to achieve with bun­dled services.

Pacific Light­Net has been test­ing a sym­met­ric DSL ser­vice that offers 2 mbps speeds for uploads and down­loads. At US$150 per month, PLN’s SDSL is expen­sive, but it can sup­port a small or home office.

Tagged as: Clearwire, DSL, Hawaii, Hawaiian-Telcom, hdtv, Honolulu, Internet, ISP, lock-in, lockin, Oahu, Pacific-LightNet, telecom, Time-Warner-Cable, USA