Aaron Epstein is a 90-year-old resident of North Hollywood, California. He's been an AT&T customer since 1960, and he's absolutely fed up with the company's failure to upgrade his 3Mbps DSL service to a modern internet connection.
He was so pissed, in fact, that he spent $10,000 on a print ad in Manhattan and Dallas editions of the Wall Street Journal on February 3 to yell at AT&T CEO John Stankey for it:
Dear Mr. Stankey,
AT&T prides itself as a leader in electronic communications.
Unfortunately, for the people who live in N. Hollywood, CA 91607, AT&T is now a major disappointment.
Many of our neighbors are the creative technical workers in the Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney studios in the adjacent city of Burbank and our city.
We need to keep up with current technology and have looked to AT&T to supply us with fast internet service. Yet, although AT&T is advertising speeds up to 100 MBS for other neighborhoods, the fastest now available to us from ATT is only 3 MBS.
Your competitors now have speeds of over 200 MBS.
Why is AT&T, a leading communications company, treating us so shabbily in North Hollywood?
Mr. Epstein's gambit paid off, according to NBC News: Stankey called him personally for a few days, and the company scrambled to complete its planned expansion of AT&T Fiber in his neighborhood.
Still, as The Verge points out, you shouldn't have to publicly humiliate AT&T to get usable internet.
AT&T customer since 1960 buys WSJ print ad to complain of slow speeds [Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica]
90-year-old man takes out $10K ads to tell AT&T CEO about slow service [Minyvonne Burke / NBC News]
You shouldn't have to publicly humiliate AT&T to get usable internet [Mitchell Clark / The Verge]
Image: Tdorante10 / Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
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