billso.com

The Honolulu Advertiser reported yesterday that Pacific LightNet has been sold to a group of mainland and local investors. Current president pat Bustamente is in the investment group. All 95 current employees will be retained.

The company had been controlled by a Japanese firm called Tomen. This prevented PLNI from bidding on many state and Federal contracts. LightNet will become a more competitive firm in the local telecom market.

PLNI has 25,000 business customers and over than 6,000 Internet subscribers in the state of Hawaii, and provides colocation, broadband Internet, VoIP, long distance calling and other services. According to the company’s web site, its telecommunication infrastructure in Hawaii includes over 10,000 miles of terrestrial and undersea fiber-optic cable connecting the six major islands.

The sale price was not disclosed in the 15 February 2008 filing with the Hawaii Public Utility Commission.

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.