According to Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke@gmail.com>:
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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. 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. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly