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Most of the 150 households on the Big Island and Maui left without internet and phone service earlier this year after Sandwich Isles Communications said it would disconnect its customers should be back online by the end of the year, officials from the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and Hawaiian Telcom told state lawmakers Wednesday.

While DHHL urged its homesteaders to switch to either Spectrum or Hawaiian Telcom after SIC announced it would be cutting off services in June, communities in Puukapu on the Big Island and Kahikinui and Keokea on Maui had no other providers to turn to.

New fiber optic lines should connect to Keokea and Puukapu by the end of the year, while work on Kahikinui could go into 2025, the officials said.

Sandwich Isles Communications was founded in the mid-1990s and tasked with connecting rural homestead communities that other large telecommunications companies decided not to service. 

The company built out an entire network with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. But it eventually ran into financial trouble, and its founder, Al Hee, was sentenced to prison on charges of tax fraud.

The company and its related entities have been in bankruptcy and other legal disputes for the last several years. Over the summer, Hee told state regulators that most of SIC’s employees had been let go. In early June, the company abruptly terminated its services to many homelands beneficiaries in violation of state law.

The department deployed wireless hotspots for some of the hardest hit communities in the interim, DHHL broadband coordinator Jaren Tengan said.

Daniel Masutomi, Hawaiian Telcom’s senior director for strategic planning, said that fiber optic lines going to Keokea are already installed and just need to be tested and splayed. Homes in that community should be connected by the end of November.

In Puukapu, Masutomi said the company is still in the process of building out its fiber optic infrastructure. Hawaiian Tel took over SIC’s conduits and equipment that hold the lines in a bankruptcy sale in July. 

But Masutomi said those manholes and conduits are in poor condition, and some are covered under mounds of dirt. Still, the company expects work to begin in November and likely be completed by the end of the year.

Connecting Kahikinui will be a little more complicated because of its remote location on the southern slopes of Haleakala as well as the fact that much of Maui doesn’t have fiber optic connection yet. The permitting process for those connections could also take a long time.

Work would likely spill into next year, Masutomi said. 

That project is part of a broader goal for Hawaiian Telcom to eventually connect fiber optic lines to Hana by running along Maui’s south shore. Masutomi didn’t say how much that would cost exactly, but said it’s in the millions of dollars.

“It’s very expensive,” he said. “It’ll take a lot of enhanced structural engineering in that area.”

Donna Sterling, president of the Kahikinui Hawaiian Homestead Association, said in an interview that residents in Kahikinui began exploring alternatives to SIC’s services after the Lahaina wildfires last August.

About 19 families live mostly off grid in Kahikinui but got landline phones with internet services from Sandwich Isles. Cell phone service has long been spotty in the area, and the wildfires made residents reconsider their dependence on landlines.

Sterling said she switched her cell service to T-Mobile, which has a tower in nearby Ulupalakua. She also paid about $600 for connection to Starlink. Now, about 10 of the 19 families living in Kahikinui have already switched to Starlink, Sterling said.

“I feel better and safer with our community,” Sterling said.

Tengan said that SIC still owes the department close to $1 million for unpaid rent related to cell towers it operated on state lands. Similarly, Spectrum has continued to operate circuits that deliver internet to SIC customers even though it hasn’t been paid, government affairs director Rebecca Lieberman said.

Watson said he wanted to cancel SIC’s contract immediately when he heard that it planned to end its services on homelands. But lawyers advised the department not to cancel the contract in an effort to force SIC to continue at least some of its services.

Although most of the 1,500 households affected by SIC cutting services were able to switch to either Spectrum or Hawaiian Tel, about 300 homes have stuck with SIC. Watson said they’ve been advised to make the switch.

“The idea is to eventually have no Sandwich Isles involvement,” he said.

Sen. Glenn Wakai suggested that DHHL should own all of the broadband infrastructure on its lands and set up operating agreements with telecommunications companies. That could avoid situations where company goes bankrupt and other parties have difficulty accessing its infrastructure, as has happened in the case with Sandwich Isles.

Tengan also doesn’t want to see another situation like this happen again.

He recalled stories from two homesteaders in affected areas.

One family had a person on a pacemaker that communicated with a medical center on the U.S. East Coast. When broadband services went down, they thought the person died.

Another household had a child on a ventilator that sent data to a children’s hospital on the mainland. That also lost connection when SIC cut services.

“That is unacceptable,” Tengan said. “It should have never happened that we put our lessee’s lives in danger.”

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