90-Year-Old Man Spent $10,000 On Ads To Tell AT&T About Slow Service

A 90-year-old California man was so frustrated with his slow AT&T internet service that he decided to spend $10,000 on two newspaper ads. Why? Just to tell the company’s CEO that he needs to do a better job of providing his neighborhood with faster speed.

KTLA News

In this day and age, we need the internet as much as we need food. And let’s just agree, internet is a basic necessity. And unfortunately, Aaron Epstein wasn’t been blessed with a reliable connection.

If you are wondering that a tweet or an Instagram Live would have made things easier but again, all of these social platforms rely on one thing: the internet.

Aaron M. Epstein has been an AT&T customer since 1960 and only started having issues with his internet speed in the last five years when internet streaming became widely available.

He was paying for 3.5 Mbps, but it couldn’t handle streaming.

“When I would watch a movie on Netflix or some other streaming service, it was like a slideshow. It would start and stop, start and stop, very frustrating,” he said in a phone interview.

And yes, like any other human being, Epstein started calling the company. He asked for faster service but was told that it wasn’t available in his area.

Speaking to ABC News, Epstein explained that he and his wife have been passing time during the coronavirus pandemic by streaming films and TV shows, but that the stream would ‘start and stop, start and stop, very frustrating’.

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And changing providers meant going through the hassle of changing his phone number and email address. So, Epstein decided to take matters into his own hands by venting on The Wall Street Journal.

He placed two ads in the renowned newspaper, titled, ‘Open Letter to Mr. John T. Stankey CEO AT&T’.

In his letter, Epstein pointed out that the area in which he lives is surrounded by ‘creative technical workers in the Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney Studios in the adjacent city of Burbank and our city’.

Therefore, he explained, ‘We need to keep up with current technology and have looked to AT&T to supply us with fast internet service.’

Epstein continued, ‘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?’

And the ad paid off. He received a call from the CEO’s office on the very same day the ads were published. The company asked Epstein how it could resolve the situation.

And within a few days, he received a surprise: two AT&T technicians who arrived at his home to set up a faster internet speed.

“It’s definitely a lot faster and it’s everything I expect of it,” he said of his new service. Epstein said that some people have praised him for what he did while others criticized him over the hefty price for the ads.