Roadrunner Nightmare - Additional Issues

Remaining Roadrunner Hawaii Issues

While the router problem affecting Roadrunner and other Hawaii ISPs using UUNet was resolved on December 30, 2000, there are additional issues that prevent "high speed" operation for some users in some situations. As of January 6, 2001, Roadrunner Hawaii has never publicly acknowledged the resolved issue, nor present issues. The Official Network Status Page indicates 'All Systems Go' - so, I have created The REAL Hawaii Roadrunner Status Page.

(1) NetEnterprise: Roadrunner (as well as a number of other Hawaii ISPs) purchase backbone connectivity from the infamous NetEnterprise operation in Honolulu. NetEnterprise has circuits from three Tier-1 providers: AT&T, Sprint, and ANS (now UUNet). These circuits are being used well above their capacity and introduce excessive latency between NetEnterprise and their customers and the Tier-1 backbones 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This has been confirmed by customer service contact with all 3 of NetEnterprise's suppliers. Niether Roadrunner nor NetEnterprise has responded to any inquiry or request for any action either plans to take to correct the situation.

This affects all Hawaii Roadrunner customers accessing sites hosted on Sprint, as the preferred path for data from the remote site back to the user will often be through NetEnterprise's overloaded circuits. Latency of 700ms or more within NetEnterprise/Hawaii is not uncommon.

In addition, a subset of Hawaii Roadrunner customers are in IP addresses whose preferred routing for many websites will be back through an AT&T circuit via NetEnterprise, and again, excessive local latency will occur due to NetEnterprise's lack of adequate bandwidth.

(2) HIX - The Hawaii Internet Exchange used to route traffic among various Hawaii providers, locations, and the University of Hawaii is overloaded. This will affect the speed of accessing sites hosted by other Hawaii providers.

(3) Inter-island transport - For islands other than Oahu (Maui and the Big Island), the capacity of the inter-island circuits through which all customer data must flow are inadequate to supply normal or typical speeds most of the time: the links between each Island's POP have a capacity under 5mbps, enough to support only 3 or 4 simultaneous users at 1mbps or higher rates before a slowdown starts to occur. When traffic is heavier, these links can cause data to slow to 100kbps or lower rates. This issue affects Roadrunner customers that do not live on Oahu.