Hawaiian Telcom Fibers Up the Entire State with Historic $1.7B Public and Private Investment Funding

Hawaiian Telcom Fibers Up the Entire State with Historic $1.7B Public and Private Investment Funding

This week on Fiber for Breakfast, Sun Shin, President of Hawaiian Telcom and first female president in its 140-year history, discussed how the company’s landmark investment of both public and private funding is enabling Hawaiian Telcom to expand and future-proof the fiber infrastructure across the state.

Watch the Fiber for Breakfast episode here!

Hawaii is like no other state when it comes to the installation and completion of fiber routes as it sits 2,500 miles away from the mainland of the continental U.S. “It is incredibly challenging for us in Hawaii as we are very remote in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” said Shin. Picking up and driving to the next county like you can on the mainland is just not possible and it adds operational and logistical challenges that increase cost and complexity to these projects.

One of the major differences when comparing projects to something done in the mainland of the U.S., is that Hawaiian Telcom has had to deal with a lot of challenging situations in this project. As you can imagine, with no bridges to get from island to island across the state, they have had to put materials on barges and people on airplanes to make this project successful. That is a major endeavor that projects in the mainland don’t have to worry about.

Shin explained that recently on January 10, 2025, multiple government officials as well as digital equity partners on both the government side and the nonprofit sector all gathered to announce that Hawaii would be the first fully fiber-enabled state in the country by 2026. “We really got incredible backing at the event, but also from others who heard the news, were talking about how excited they were and how truly transformative they thought the investment was going to be,” said Shin. She went on to say, “They were genuinely grateful, excited, and there’s a sense of pride as well that we’re going to be working together to be able to bridge the digital divide.”

In terms of timelines, Shin explained that the island is about 60% fiber enabled today and they are 100% complete on Lanai, Molokai and parts of Kauai, Maui, Oahu, and the Hawaii island. In the next two years (2025 – 2026), they’re going to be focusing on fiber enabling the rest of the state and finish up Hawaii soon. She commented that they’re on track to complete Maui by the end of 2025 quickly followed by Oahu and Hawaii island by the end of 2026. Shin stated “I’m confident that we’re going to achieve this and execute on this. Our employees are really dedicated to this goal because they live here and raise their family here. They know how much broadband connectivity means to our communities and so they’re really passionate about it. They’re excited about what this means not just for our company but for the entire state.”

The Importance of Communications
As you may recall, Hawaii was recently ravaged by wildfires and other natural disasters, and it is becoming increasingly important that a state like Hawaii has the infrastructure to be able to have life-saving communication capabilities when disaster strikes. Shin explained that in the wake of the recent wildfires in Maui the ability to have communication was critical. Teams were mobilized across the state and were flown over to help get shelters stood up. Since so many people were displaced, the one thing that stood out was the need for connectivity so that people could contact their family and friends to let them know they were ok.

Shin said, “There’s a word in the Hawaiian language; it’s called ‘kuleana,’ and it means responsibility, and we talk about that a lot at Hawaiian Telcom, and I think it is what motivates our team in times of crisis like the Maui wildfires, natural disasters, hurricanes and the like. They genuinely feel this sense of responsibility, because we know how important connectivity is and we know how much our family, our friends, our neighbors, our community rely on the connectivity we provide, which is why this initiative is so critical, because we know our legacy network cannot support the needs of our community.”