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| Review of Hawaii Broadband's Performance By A Former Client |
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| If you have any doubts about the following review of this company's performance, please bear in mind two things. First, that we would not waste our time putting up false accusations, and second, that if they were false we would be open to libel claims from the company concerned. |
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BUYER BEWARE!
Question: Why did Diagnose-Me.com spend time and money to put up this web page?
Answer: Simple. We have just been through an episode with Hawaii Broadband that is so mind-bogglingly customer-unfriendly that our story should serve as a warning to anyone who is considering falling for their "Personal service with Aloha" line.
Diagnose-Me.com has been through 2 years of ISP hell with Hawaii Broadband, and we don't want other Big Island residents to suffer similarly.
The final straw occurred in January 2008 when we had been experiencing serious connection problems for over 1 month. Hawaii Broadband admitted that "The equipment in Papaaloa is the original equipment - left over from the original wireless experiment - and really needs to be replaced." Problems continued every day, and while Bob usually answered the phone and rebooted the system reasonably quickly, repeated promises to do something about the problem came and went.
Finally, in response to our complaint that a 5-week ongoing problem was not being addressed, we were told "I don't want to hear your complaints". E-mails that were then sent were not responded to within a week, despite later acknowledgement that they had been received. After complaining that this attitude was unacceptable from a service provider who is paid in advance, "Broadband Bob" simply hung up the phone.
Why did we stick with it for 2 years? Again, simple - there are few alternatives in this area and Bob Holmes plays (preys?) on that fact. As a result he adopts a "Like it or eat shit" attitude to people who have genuine, serious, ongoing problems with their connections. To quote from his web site, www.HiBroad.com:
"Service is provided on a best effort basis. No warranty is given or implied regarding reliability, continuity, or level of service. If service is judged to be unacceptable or unusable, Customer's sole recourse is to discontinue use of Hawaii Broadband services."
We have found out the hard way, having paid the outrageous $800 installation fee, that he really means what he writes: If you don't like the fact that his service suffers from unending problems, you know where the door is. Just don't expect a refund for equipment or unused service.
Fortunately, technology is evolving quickly and Hawaii Broadband (even when it is working properly) will soon be outpaced by much larger, cheaper, more reliable, better-staffed and more customer-friendly alternatives.
It should be borne in mind that we weren't just an ordinary client of Mr. Holmes. Hawaii Broadband operates on a shoestring budget, so much so that an overworked Bob Holmes can not afford staff, drives a truck that needs to be topped up with water every few miles, has no fixed living address, needs to recycle hardware, and uses hardware beyond its designed lifespan. Needing reliable Internet service, we loaned Mr. Holmes $5,000 as an interest-free loan for 6 months. Earmarked for service improvements that never materialized, he refused to even discuss repayment of the loan 18 months later (when we parted company), thus forcing us to seek legal recourse. We had been wise enough to turn down further loan requests by Bob.
Not only did we try to help Bob Holmes in growing his business (unfortunately, he did not listen to common sense business advice, and thus continues to struggle), but we were extremely patient. Connection problems, which involved frequent dropped connections, high 'ping's and poor performance verging on being completely unusable, generally went on for weeks and months. Bob Holmes claims to welcome calls whenever something goes wrong, and usually he does respond promptly in order to do a quick/temporary fix. However, our ongoing problems reached the point where we did not want to call him up a dozen times each day. This is simply not the way an ISP should work.
A simple request in September of 2007 to install a second connection at another building took 6 weeks, and only took place after repeated promises along the lines of "I'll be up next Wednesday afternoon" were broken. Despite having been told that the delay was due to Mr. Holmes ordering a new radio/antenna, we ended up with a rusting second-hand device that had been hastily ripped out of some other installation. Right after completing the installation, Hawaii Broadband connected another client nearby and we started having severe connection quality issues for weeks: An almost complete lack of effort was made until we became more vociferous out of necessity (one can only request politely a certain number of times, after all). Eventually we received a call back from a sheepish-sounding Bob saying that he had looked into it and found that a radio's power level or frequency setting had been incorrect all along.
Unfortunately, Bob's motto seems to be, "Never do today what could be done tomorrow". Apparently impervious to customers' issues, he can not seem to grasp that fixing a problem NOW takes the same amount of time as fixing it later, and has the additional benefits of avoiding hundreds of support calls and building goodwill.
A few weeks of good service later, problems resurfaced. Dropped connections, no connection, high 'ping's frequently during each day, sometimes all day, necessitating use of our slower (but orders of magnitude more reliable - we have not called tech support in 3 years) backup Verizon connection. Here are typical screenshots resulting from pinging one of the Hawaii Broadband radios (I created a script called 'p.bat' because we had to ping these radios so darned often!):
Note that pings to local radios (as in the top image above) should be single-digit milliseconds, not triple- and quadruple-digit. Under such conditions, an Internet connection becomes unusable, since most web sites and e-mail servers time-out for lack of response. The second image shows one of Hawaii Broadband's radios being unable to contact the next one down the line: service completely down, another common occurrence.
Other issues with Hawaii Broadband's service all contributed to the problem, such as Bob's inability to install basic bandwidth-limiting features or differentiate between high- and low-use customers (who should pay more, and less, respectively). A consequence of this was that anyone sharing a radio with ourselves who decided to run BitTorrent, download a movie, etc. caused our connection to grind to a halt.
If asked to guess, we would estimate that we received good quality Internet connection for approximately one out of the two years that we used his service, and that on average a serious problem or significant request was dealt with in roughly 4-6 weeks, if at all. This quality of service might be alright for downloading a couple of e-mails a day, but it is totally unacceptable for serious Internet users.
Bob Holmes's attitude is all the more remarkable given the following:
- He received a significant interest-free loan from us -- what is his attitude towards clients who have not loaned him money?
- Instead of deducting fees for such things as a new radio (one that actually worked) and monthly usage from the outstanding loan balance, we allowed him to bill us for these things.
- We run a very successful business, and Bob is aware of that. We made it clear on numerous occasions that quality and reliability was more important than cost, and that we were prepared to pay a lot for reliable service. Nothing appears to motivate Mr. Holmes -- not money, not repeated requests to fix problems, and not an advance preview of this web page before it went live.
Bob keeps doing what he's doing... bobbing along... with little interest in improving his service offerings, keeping up with the times or fixing existing problems. That's a surefire way to go out of business. Our gut feeling is that this one-man show (it is never good for a business to depend solely on one individual) is in trouble; that Bob is out of funds, out of time, stressed to breaking point and simply unable to provide acceptable service.
In short, if you are desperate for an Internet connection in a remote area, and don't like Verizon or AT&T's $60-80 per month (with no/negligible setup fee) services, then by all means try Hawaii Broadband. You will certainly get some Internet connection, but have a backup service if you depend on connectivity each day (we once had a 3-day outage caused by Bob blowing up 3 radios while converting a power system from 12 volts to 24). Also be sure to request a copy of Bob's company financials because a company that refuses to even discuss repayment of an overdue loan has questionable stability and ethics: the $800 setup charge is non-refundable.
We can be contacted through the "Contact Us" page of this web site.
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