Hāna Business Council Broadband Committee
Broadband Related Articles
Letter Writing Campaign for Spectrum Cable Franchise Renewal
Customers Can Email or Submit Online to the DCCA, DUE ASAP no later than October 2025
The Hana Business Council’s Broadband Committee is working to have Spectrum give credit automatically to all Hana customers for service outages, so that individual customers would no longer have to call in to request it. This can be done by having it included as a requirement for their franchise renewal. We are asking for community support in this endeavor. To support our cause, copy and paste or download the accompanying letter, add the current date, your name and email it to the DCCA (Department of Commerce & Consumer Affairs) as shown below.
To request outage compensation as requirement within the new franchise agreement, email: cabletv@dcca.hawaii.gov
To file this request as a complaint you can use the DCCA online form: https://hdcca.hawaii.gov/s/cable-television-complaints
Click below to download, or just copy and paste from this page, the following sample letter.
(You will find this download sent to your computer’s file manager DOWNLOADS folder in an editable .docx format)
Click **HERE** SAMPLE LETTER
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Nadine Y. Ando
Director
Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs
State of Hawaii
<DATE OF SUBMISSION>
Aloha DCCA,
As a business, it is understandable that Spectrum is motivated to increase income and decrease expenses. In rural communities where they are serving a small number of clients in a large area it is understandable for their need to keep maintenance costs down, but it should not come at the expense of the consumer. Currently Spectrum is allowed to apply charges for services they are not providing. Hana is on a microwave dish that connects all customers and when that connection fails everyone in Hana has to request credit for the outage. Very few choose to note the time of the outage and go through the process to seek credit. Those who do not request credit are paying for a service that they are not receiving.
Being a large company with limited competition and self-protecting policies should not excuse unfair business practices, nor should geographic location or technical limitations. All customers should be treated equally and fairly. Compensation for poor service is only fair and should be the practice of a reputable business. With current technology Spectrum knows when the service is slow and when it is out for an entire area they shouldn’t have to be asked by every individual customer for fair compensation.
Spectrum profits by bringing in more customers, but there is little incentive for Spectrum to maintain quality service over a spread out base of customers. The best way to assure that Spectrum is maintaining quality service is to only allow them to charge the customer for the services that they have received. For franchise renewal Spectrum should be required to automatically give credit for a whole day when service is out for more than four hours. While the franchise renewal is for television we ask that it be extended to include the internet that customers in Hana are dependent on for doing business.
There needs to be an incentive for Spectrum to maintain the service that we paid for and this appears as the best way to do that.
YOUR NAME, Hana District Spectrum Customer
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For assistance contact Bill Sides:
HANA BROADBAND COMMITTEE, A Sub-Committee of THE HANA BUSINESS COUNCIL