45 thoughts on “Oceanic Time Warner Cable hit for poor customer support”

1. johnp January 28, 2013 at 6:49 am

   TNT HD has not worked for more than a year now on Oceanic. Last year they said they know of the problem and engineers are working on it. I have not called this year. The only reason I know is because I wanted to watch the NBA playoffs in HD. Other than live sports I don’t watch much TV at all.

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2. Reader January 28, 2013 at 8:52 am

   I also have trees but gave back my Oceanic box and now get only the local channels for approx $16.00 per month.

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3. Oceanic Ed January 28, 2013 at 10:39 am

   Aloha All. I apologize for the issues some of you have been facing. I would love to be of personal assistance to anyone reading this post on Mr. Lind’s blog. Please DM me on Facebook either via our Oceanic Time Warner Cable Facebook page or to my personal profile: https://www.facebook.com/OceanicCable or https://www.facebook.com/OceanicEd and I will try my best to help get all of your issues resolved. Please do not reply to me here on the blog as I would hate to miss it.

   Mahalo Mr. Lind for creating this forum to give me a head’s up of what’s going with your readership.

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   1. Cici January 28, 2013 at 2:19 pm

      Not everyone wants to have a Facebook account, Ed, and shouldn’t have to in order to receive decent service. I have a hunch you will be checking back here, because you know Ian’s blog is influential in Hawaii, but if not, you should.

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   2. tim January 28, 2013 at 5:54 pm

      I agree with Cici. At the very least, please provide a *useful* email address here. Mahalo!

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   3. Ray May 25, 2013 at 12:32 pm

      Ed…are you aware that no one can post on your facebook page any more? What’s up…can’t stand the heat?

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4. Oceanic Ed January 29, 2013 at 9:49 am

   Aloha Cici & tim. I manage our social media so unfortunately, these would be the only ways to contact me directly. To contact Care directly, you can call 643-2100, visit one of our Customer Care Centers (http://www.oceanic.com/help/about_your_bill/ccc ) or do as @rlb_hawaii mentioned above and try a chat session (http://bit.ly/otwcchat ).

   Mr. Lind, if you are in contact with Sally Raisbeck, please let her know that I replied to her thread yesterday (Re: TCM), but have not heard back from her yet. Mahalo!

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5. mel January 29, 2013 at 7:13 pm

   My simple advice – “Cut the Cord”. Been happy without Oceanic cable and their $63 monthly bill for basic cable with channels that I did not watch. It’s been 2 years now, and I am internet only.

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6. compare and decide January 31, 2013 at 12:11 pm

   If the Internet makes television obsolete, it would be yet another classic example of ‘disruptive innovation’.

   Disruptive innovation helps to explain how so many successful, sophisticated technologies and projects are doomed.

   Disruptive innovation is also deeply challenging to cherished notions of ‘progress’.

   But perhaps most importantly … disruptive innovation suggests what kind of cell phone we should buy!

   From the wiki on ‘disruptive innovation’:

   A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.

   Disruptive innovation stands in contrast to ‘sustaining innovation’, which is the improvement of the current technology, whether this improvement is evolutionary or revolutionary. Confusing these two forms of innovation is a common mistake; in fact, if you google ‘disruptive innovation’, most of the examples given are of sustaining innovation (same old technology, only bigger and faster).

   In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with better value, allowing the firms within to compete against each other’s sustaining improvements. Sustaining innovations may be either “discontinuous” (i.e. “transformational” or “revolutionary”) or “continuous” (i.e. “evolutionary”).

   Another common mistake in terms of disruption is confusing innovation with technology. It’s not a particular technology that matters, it is how it is used.

   The term “disruptive technology” has been widely used as a synonym of “disruptive innovation”, but the latter is now preferred, because market disruption has been found to be a function usually not of technology itself but rather of its changing application. Sustaining innovations are typically innovations in technology, whereas disruptive innovations change entire markets. For example, the automobile was a revolutionary technological innovation, but it was not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market for transportation essentially remained intact until the debut of the lower priced Ford Model T in 1908. The mass-produced automobile was a disruptive innovation, because it changed the transportation market. The automobile, by itself, was not.
   …
   The term disruptive technologies was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and introduced in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, which he co-wrote with Joseph Bower. The article is aimed at managing executives who make the funding/purchasing decisions in companies rather than the research community. He describes the term further in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovator’s Dilemma explored the cases of the disk drive industry (which, with its rapid generational change, is to the study of business what fruit flies are to the study of genetics, as Christensen was advised in the 1990s) and the excavating equipment industry (where hydraulic actuation slowly displaced cable-actuated movement). In his sequel with Michael E Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution Christensen replaced the term disruptive technology with disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact. However, Christensen’s evolution from a technological focus to a business modelling focus is central to understanding the evolution of business at the market or industry level. Christensen and Mark W. Johnson described the dynamics of “business model innovation” in the 2008 Harvard Business Review article “Reinventing Your Business Model”. The concept of disruptive technology continues a long tradition of the identification of radical technical change in the study of innovation by economists, and the development of tools for its management at a firm or policy level.

   In keeping with the insight that what matters economically is the business model, not the technological sophistication itself, Christensen’s theory explains why many disruptive innovations are not “advanced technologies”, which the technology mudslide hypothesis would lead one to expect. Rather, they are often novel combinations of existing off-the-shelf components, applied cleverly to a small, fledgling value network.
   …
   “Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.”

   The single biggest error in terms of innovation is the myth that businesses decline because they fail to keep up in terms of technological sophistication. Rather, the technology that eventually kills their market is often something marginal, cheap and crude that does not at first seem to pose an apparent threat. Businesses stubbornly and mistakenly tend to see the sophisticated sustaining innovation that their major competitors produce as the real threat.

   The current theoretical understanding of disruptive innovation is different from what might be expected by default, an idea that Clayton M. Christensen called the “technology mudslide hypothesis”. This is the simplistic idea that an established firm fails because it doesn’t “keep up technologically” with other firms. In this hypothesis, firms are like climbers scrambling upward on crumbling footing, where it takes constant upward-climbing effort just to stay still, and any break from the effort (such as complacency born of profitability) causes a rapid downhill slide. Christensen and colleagues have shown that this simplistic hypothesis is wrong; it doesn’t model reality. What they have shown is that good firms are usually aware of the innovations, but their business environment does not allow them to pursue them when they first arise, because they are not profitable enough at first and because their development can take scarce resources away from that of sustaining innovations (which are needed to compete against current competition). In Christensen’s terms, a firm’s existing value networks place insufficient value on the disruptive innovation to allow its pursuit by that firm. Meanwhile, start-up firms inhabit different value networks, at least until the day that their disruptive innovation is able to invade the older value network. At that time, the established firm in that network can at best only fend off the market share attack with a me-too entry, for which survival (not thriving) is the only reward.

   The work of Christensen and others during the 2000s has addressed the question of what firms can do to avoid oblivion brought on by technological disruption.

   There are a plethora of examples. Christensen began his research studying the floppy disk.

   The floppy disk drive market has had unusually large changes in market share over the past fifty years. According to Clayton M. Christensen’s research, the cause of this instability was a repeating pattern of disruptive innovations. For example, in 1981, the old 8 inch drives (used in mini computers) were “vastly superior” to the new 5.25 inch drives (used in desktop computers). However, 8 inch drives were not affordable for the new desktop machines. The simple 5.25 inch drive, assembled from technologically inferior “off-the-shelf” components, was an “innovation” only in the sense that it was new. However, as this market grew and the drives improved, the companies that manufactured them eventually triumphed while many of the existing manufacturers of eight inch drives fell behind.

   Another example was hydraulic excavators, which were initially inferior to but more convenient than the cable-operated excavators that they later replaced. Likewise, inferior mini-steel mills came to replace vertically integrated steel mills. Also, inferior mini-computers replaced mainframes, and were in turn replaced by inferior personal computers, which were replaced by laptops, which were displaced by tablets, etc., etc. Inferior cell phone cameras replaced digital cameras, which had themselves replaced superior film cameras. Cheap transistor radios replaced the superior vacuum-tube radios. LEDs, once very expensive and poor quality, are replacing fluorescent bulbs, which have replaced less expensive yet superior light bulbs. The once-inferior LCD has replaced the cathode-ray tube computer monitor. Wikipedia (where I am getting all this) killed Microsoft’s Encarta in 2005 and killed the revered Encyclopedia Britannica in 2012.

   Once an inferior but convenient technology gains a foothold in a niche of the broader market, its share grows as its quality improves over time. For example, often the new technology is geographically constrained and poses no real competition to the status quo at first, but as its quality improves so does its range. This is how the locally-used telephone later overcame the long-distance telegraph, and the locally-used automobile later overcame the long-distance rail system.

   To be fair, it’s extremely difficult for decision makers to see that The Next Big Thing is actually today’s little, inferior thing.

   Disruptive technologies are not always disruptive to customers, and often take a long time before they are significantly disruptive to established companies. They are often difficult to recognize. Indeed, as Christensen points out and studies have shown, it is often entirely rational for incumbent companies to ignore disruptive innovations, since they compare so badly with existing technologies or products, and the deceptively small market available for a disruptive innovation is often very small compared to the market for the established technology.

   Even if a disruptive innovation is recognized, existing businesses are often reluctant to take advantage of it, since it would involve competing with their existing (and more profitable) technological approach. Christensen recommends that existing firms watch for these innovations, invest in small firms that might adopt these innovations, and continue to push technological demands in their core market so that performance stays above what disruptive technologies can achieve.

   So how would one identify an emerging disruptive innovation?

   Let’s look at smartphones.

   The smart phone is the exception that proves the rule. The smart phone may seem like a souped-up cell phone, and therefore an example of sustaining evolution. And, to some degree, this is what it is. But it is also a relatively inexpensive and rather crude computer, making it a classic example of disruptive innovation. So a technology (smart phones) can simultaneously be a sustaining innovation in its own field (cell phones) but a fatally disruptive innovation to other industries (desktop and even laptop computers).

   The smart phone eats the market for laptops, which ate PCs, which ate mini-computers, which ate mainframes….

   So what device might replace smart phones like the iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy?

   That might be an MP3 player, like the iPod Touch or the Samsung Galaxy Player, wired for speech and operating over municipal-wide Wi-Fi, or over a cheap municipal wireless network (or better, an even cheaper wireless community network).

   Here is a kind of hybrid, Republic Wireless’s phone plan that combines G3 and WiFi.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/business/republic-wirelesss-plan-melds-wi-fi-and-network-calling.html

   AN Android smartphone with unlimited calls, unlimited texting, unlimited data and no contract, all for $19 a month? Really?

   When I first saw this offer fromRepublic Wireless, I rubbed my eyes and looked for an asterisk leading to fine print that detailed a huge catch. But Republic, a division of a telecom company called Bandwidth.com, delivers exactly what it advertises. It can do so because the handset technology is a curious hybrid: it uses Wi-Fi when the customer is in a Wi-Fi area and Sprint Nextel’s 3G network when it is not.

   The concept brings together the best of two worlds: the low cost of voice calls carried over the Internet and the convenience of making calls to any phone number using a major carrier’s cellular network when Wi-Fi isn’t available.

   In my own case, on a typical day, I use my mobile phone mostly when I’m not actually mobile: I’m either at home or at work, perfectly positioned to use Wi-Fi at both locations. And I don’t even use the phone as a phone all that much. I use it mainly for e-mail and texts, neither of which requires enough bandwidth to benefit from the power of the fastest data networks.

   If you walk into a Verizon Wireless store and buy an iPhone 5, you’ll pay $60 or more a month for an unlimited talk and texting plan, depending on the data allocation for Internet use that you select to go with it. Some of that monthly charge goes toward repaying the carrier for the discounted price that makes a $649 iPhone seem as if it costs only $200. But most of the charge is for gaining access to the carrier’s wireless network.

   “We were looking at a mobile industry that had begun to charge extraordinary amounts of money, and we saw an industry opportunity that everybody else was missing: Wi-Fi is the new mobile,” says David Morken, co-founder and chief executive of Bandwidth, based in Raleigh, N.C.

   Smartphone apps that offer voice calls using data plans, not minutes allocated for calls, are plentiful. Just last month, Facebook quietly added an option that lets users of the iPhone version of Facebook Messenger place free voice calls to other Messenger users. But using those apps to make a call means the recipient has to run the same app, an irksome requirement that never comes up when using phones alone.

   Republic buys access to Sprint’s network on a wholesale basis for calls made outside of Wi-Fi areas. Its business model assumes, however, that Wi-Fi carries the load a majority of the time its phones are used. The company says that its service, even at $19 a month, is a profitable operation on a per-customer basis.

   “We don’t have to force people, or even ask people, how to behave,” Mr. Morken says. “Over 60 percent of the time that the phone is being used, on average, our users are using Wi-Fi and that number is only going up.”

   This phone is still a very imperfect technology. (For example, when one exits a WiFi area, the phone temporarily shuts off until you press a button to turn on the G3, although a fix has been found.) But that imperfection – along with cheapness – is a hallmark of disruptive innovation.

   Here’s the critical reaction to the phone by a major cellular provider, Sprint:

   Matt Carter, president of the Global Wholesale and Emerging Solutions division at Sprint, asserted that the company was happy to serve as Republic’s supplier. When I asked whether Republic’s Wi-Fi-centric model, with its drastically lower price to the consumer, would pose a serious threat to the incumbent carriers, including Sprint, he said, “If the world operated based on just economic decisions, people wouldn’t go buy the most expensive cars on the planet, right?”

   Mr. Carter listed reasons that most consumers would prefer the wireless service obtained directly from a major carrier: a wider range of devices and the convenience of placing a call without having to tinker with Wi-Fi setup.

   Republic “will resonate with a sliver of the marketplace,” Mr. Carter said. He compared wireless carriers to the major airline carriers, which still control a majority of the market despite low-priced upstarts like JetBlue or Southwest, which he described as appealing only to “a certain segment of the population.”

   Famous last words. That’s what they always say.

   What would the exact opposite of innovative disruption be?

   That could be Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. It is classic sustaining innovation gone wrong: The same old thing, only super-big, super-sophisticated and super-expensive (and super-dubious).

   (Not just business executives, but technology journalists seem to be stuck in the mode of sustaining innovation. In the latest Wired Magazine there is an article, “7 Massive Ideas That Can Change the World”. The first idea is “Make airplanes rechargeable”. Some folks just don’t get it.)

   If there is an analogy to be found in the natural world to disruptive innovation in the economy, it might be the demise of the dinosaurs. Small mammals were in comparison to dinosaurs much less efficient because, in order to maintain a constant body temperature, mammals had to constantly be on the search for food, expending calories in the process as well as making themselves vulnerable to predators. However, as the earth cooled millions of years ago, and cold-blooded dinosaurs began to evolve to become bigger and bigger in order to retain body heat, dinosaurs lost their competitive advantage of a more efficient metabolism.

   In fact, the idea of disruptive evolution extends into the economic realm a kind of disillusionment with the idea of progress that really exploded into the modern world with Darwin’s theory of evolution. That theory destroyed the notion that there was a ‘great chain of being’ that extended from the ‘lowest’ animals up to the ‘highest’ (humans). Indeed, Darwin has been misinterpreted in a way, in terms of the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’: ‘natural selection’ does not mean that fitness determines survival; rather, it means that whatever random traits that happen to promote survival in a particular situation will determine what ‘fitness’ consists of. There is no necessary progress from primitive to sophisticated organisms. Evolution is fundamentally blind.

   This Darwinian theory also undermined an even deeper religious view that there was some ultimate goal of salvation toward which we progress, whether it was individual salvation (Christianity) or national salvation (Judaism). In the political realm, it was the two world wars and the Holocaust that undermined Europeans’ belief in progress as ‘civilization’, that societies progress from a primitive and then later barbaric state toward rational enlightenment. (This also undermined the rationale for colonialism, which was to bring civilization to the world. In fact, colonialism began to look barbaric.) In the US, intellectuals likewise grew disillusioned with the idea of progress at this time, but in popular American culture this was masked over because the world wars corresponded with a period of growth of American economic and political power. Disillusionment with the idea of progress did not really happen in the US at the popular level until the Vietnam war and later with the hollowing out of the economy. Indeed, in the economic realm, although Americans are just as materialistic as they have ever been, the notion of personal wealth as a sign of personal progress in the world (a very Protestant idea) is now a thing of the past. Americans are still avid consumers, but the idea that owning a giant house and giant car means that you are advancing in life is now widely seen as a sorry myth. (Sometimes a big truck is just a big truck.)

   The last bastion of the idea of progress in the popular imagination is really technology. Ordinary people often seem to invest so much emotion into technology as a sign of ‘progress’ and virtue that it is almost a kind of secular religion (hence the near canonization of Steve Jobs after his death). But the idea of disruptive innovation undermines this sense of natural progress. So-called ‘progress’ only happens within a certain framework or paradigm, but those frameworks are eventually overthrown by something alien and unexpected. There might be technological ‘progression’ in terms of constant change, but there is no real progress in terms of a straight line toward a fixed goal. Evolution is blind. Life is random. Think different.

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7. tom8 January 31, 2013 at 6:53 pm

   hate them–feel sad for the employees.

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8. Ray May 25, 2013 at 11:05 am

   I have just tried to post a complaint on the Oceanic Facebook page but it gets deleted every time!!!!!

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9. Richard June 21, 2013 at 8:56 pm

   I have oceanic for phone and internet. It sucks. I swear I lose my internet connection every 10 minutes. Sometimes its out for 5 minutes. Sometimes its out the whole night. Same for landline phone.

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10. David August 29, 2013 at 3:02 am

    I’ve had enough. It all started with the diminishing channels. Then they got rid of showtime, Gave stars to people in lieu of credit, which doesn’t work for me, I already pay for stars, and apparently I’m not eligible to get it free skin e I pay for it. But most aggravating was the modem lease fee starting. When I started service I had my own modem of bought shortly prior to my pcs. They told me I couldn’t use it here. But they were providing me with free equipment, ok I suppose. I tossed the $300 multinand docsos 3 modem in the trash. They bring a dinosaur that doesn’t even have wifi, Go buy $200 wifi router. Now I have a router and a docsys2.0 dinosaur that I’m paying monthly for ,seriously!
    As for the cable tv. I am cjnoetitikn to direct this week!

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11. Suki Halevi September 10, 2013 at 11:08 am

    Oceanic Time Warner Cable has applied for a renewal of its Maui County franchises. There will be public hearings soon. This would be an excellent time to voice any continuing complaints and concerns. If you would like to know more about the hearings, please contact Suki at Akaku: Maui Community Television, 871-5554.

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12. Ann Pitt December 17, 2015 at 7:58 pm

    It is inexcusable for a corporation like Oceanic Time Warner Cable to not offer Turner Classic Channel. What is up with that?

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