California
A 90-year-old man spent $10,000 on a newspaper advert complaining that his slow internet was stopping him from watching Netflix.
Aaron Epstein, from Hollywood, California, wrote an open letter to the CEO of his neighbourhoodâs internet provider, AT&T, hitting out at his area'sshabbyâ internet speed.
Aaron Epstein took out the quarter-page ads in The Wall Street Journal out of frustration that AT&T had not provided anything faster than 3 Mbps to his home in January 2021.
I mean how upset one must be, over slow home internet speeds, to pay for a personal quarter-page national ad in print @WSJ pic.twitter.com/Zk9umKD0t1
â Raju Narisetti (@raju) February 3, 2021
Epsteinâs ad in the Wall Street Journal lambasted the company for their slow speeds in his neighbourhood, averaging only 3 Mbps, while AT&T offers speeds over 900 Mbps elsewhere in the country.
"I kept calling AT&T," he told KTLA last Thursday, asking the company, "'When are you going to give us a faster speed?' They said, 'It's coming, it's coming.' But what really made me angry was they started putting ads in the paper and sending emails and putting ads on the internet [saying], 'Try our faster speed.'"
A week later, AT&T workers showed up at Epsteinâs door to tell him they would be installing fibre optic connections previously unavailable in his neighbourhood.
(With inputs from agencies)