On 8/17/23 2:03 AM, John Levine wrote:
> According to Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke@gmail.com>:
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>>
>> It's my understanding that the Hawaiian ILEC is now owned by Cincinnati
>> Bell, which is also a unique historical artifact, as it was its own
>> independent corporation/operating entity in the region of Cincinnati during
>> the era of the pre-1984 Bell system.
>
> Not that unique, SNET was also a Bell affiliate in most of Connecticut.
>
> Hawaiian Tel has a very painful history. It was independent until
> 1967, then bought by GTE, then merged into Verizon along with the rest
> of GTE in 2000, then sold to a hedge fund in 2004 which knew nothing
> about telephony and ran it into bankruptcy, then an independent public
> company from 2010 to 2017, when it was bought by Cincinnati Bell,
> which in turn was bought in 2021 by Australian conglomerate Macquarie.

Yep, that's it.  And the hedge fund (The Carlyle Group) thing was a
complete disaster.  I was here for all that.  Fugly is all I can say.



> Running phone systems on islands is very expensive. There's only
> 160,000 people on Maui, about the same as Salinas CA, but separated
> from the rest of the world by a lot of water.

We have a lot of undersea fiber and it is all connected into one big
MPLS network for the internet stuff.  There is still SS7 stuff out
there, too.  I am unfamiliar with that part.

scott