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90-year-old man spends $10k on 2 ads in WSJ to tell AT&T CEO about slow internet
- alexashka 6y agoThere's an excellent movie along the same lines, called 'Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri'
- freebuju 6y ago"How come, Chief Willoughby?"
- monksy 6y agoThis will be me in 60 years .. minus the customer loyalty. I've been thinking about doing that with billboards to remind people about the bad politicians that we've had right before elections.
- bushbaba 6y agoI was shocked just how cheap a bill board actually is. Thousand dollars gets you a few days worth of impressions
- TT3351 6y agoI have seen a variety of "IHate[SoAndSo].com" websites advertised on highway billboards. I can't say I've ever followed through to investigate the source of anger but I'm impressed with the commitment.
- swebs 6y agoThat's just an ad campaign for a jewelry store. https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/22062/why_does_someone_hate_steven_singer_this_much_and_who_the_heck_is_he https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/22062/why_does_some...
- s1artibartfast 6y agoIs this really a sad story about the state of the Competition between Internet providers? Is three Mbps the only service available, or is the user refusing to switch to some other faster service? If the former, what is stopping over the other providers from coming in to fill the obvious demand?
- bdibs 6y agohttps://wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI am aware of the concept, but curious if this is the case here.
- ngngngng 6y agoUntil last year 3mb/s was one of two options available to me, the other was 15mb/s with terrible ping and an extremely low download/upload limit. Fortunately, Utah hasn't allowed these companies to stifle competition and now my highest speed available is 100Gb/s fiber connection, though I only pay for 300mb/s.
- CameronNemo 6y agoWhat specific policies has Utah adopted to incentivize these speeds?
- ryandrake 6y agoAccording to the article, in this case, the customer is loyal to AT&T, who only offers 3MBps, where other competitors in the area offer up to 200. He should probably just switch to a competitor. It's not like they're going to suddenly decide to offer high speed internet in his area because of the stunt. They likely have no plans to, despite saying they're "working on it".
- nickik 6y agoStarlink is for you.
- swarnie_ 6y agoIsn't starlink for people in 3rd world countries found in Africa, Asia and the Midwest? This chap is living in North Hollywood, he should expect a cheap/fast wired connection in 2021.
- nickik 6y agoStarlink is for everybody that is not happy with their current providers. He can expect what he likes, maybe he will get it, maybe not.
- latch 6y agoX world countries is antiquated, no? The events of the last few years (Brexit, Trump, BLM, COVID) should make anyone think twice about labeling one country as "first world" and another as "developing".
- cbg0 6y agoWith the advent of higher 4G coverage and now even 5G, are these types of wireless home internet connections not a real option in the US?
- Aloha 6y agoNot really, no.
- TedShiller 6y agoYes
- s1artibartfast 6y ago5G doesn’t penetrate walls, so the individual would a hardline to an in home source. 4G could be an option but 4g carriers do not cater to internet only plans, preferring to push mobile hotspots as a solution.
- xxpor 6y ago5g != mmWave 5g I wish we had a better way to distinguish the two. A signal at (to make up a number) 1200mhz is wildly different than one at 60 ghz.
- kiwijamo 6y agoAgreed. mmWave 5G deployment is not that common from my observation around the world. For example here in NZ most, if not all, 5G deployments is in the 3.5 GHz band (with some test deployment in 2.6 GHz in areas where it is not in use for 4G). Overseas 3.5 GHz is also fairly common. I am aware of deployment in the UK in 2.1 GHz band (currently used for 4G/3G).
- aembleton 6y agoCan't you get an external antenna such as the Huawei 5G AF9E: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AF9E-boosting-frequency-3300-4200MHz-installation/dp/B083L1GY26 https://www.amazon.co.uk/AF9E-boosting-frequency-3300-4200MH...
- XargonEnder 6y agoI agree, he is crazy, my kind of crazy. I hope it works out for him and his community.
- kilroy123 6y agoMy first thought was, this man is my hero.
- shadeslayer_ 6y agoAs someone from India, it is unbelievable that someone from California - an affluent state in a first-world country - has to actually pay for a 3.5Mbps connection in 2021. For context, I was paying around $11/mo for a 40Mbps connection in 2016.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bruceb 6y agoA bit of apples to mangos comparison. California is a big state. There is gig internet available depends where you live. India the internet speed would vary based where you live. Also US internet in general will be more reliable, won't go out when it rains hard. With all that said yeah US is behind for wide spread fast internet.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoYes, and north Hollywood isn’t exactly a rural backwater
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago"Also US internet in general will be more reliable, won't go out when it rains hard." Why do you believe that US internet is any more reliable than any other, especially since many countries have fiber to home?
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- baxtr 6y agoAs a side point: there is the adage that infrastructure is key for economic success. But then the internet connections I had in the states and the mobile phone connections were really, really awful. But still, major tech players are from the states. I think infrastructure is overrated.
- berkes 6y agoBut is the infrastructure awful in and around the places where those major tech players reside? Or mostly in places in the US where there are no such major tech players?
- ipsum2 6y agoBay area has okay internet, but nothing outstanding. Gigabit is unavailable in most areas, even in Google headquarter land (Mountain View).
- tomaszs 6y agoI have bought once Facebook ads around Facebook headquarters, when my Instagram account got hacked and there was no way to get it back. Maybe I should have use billboards...
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoReminds me of "Old man yells at cloud" [0]. [0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud
- floatingatoll 6y agoIs this due to his city/locality refusing to permit aboveground Internet distribution points, in order to protect the appearance of certain film industry neighborhoods? If so, AT&T might be trying to avoid an extremely costly “underground on every block in the postal code” buildout.
- spinlock 6y agoAT&T had a project to run fiber into every home in America in the 90s. It was scheduled to be completed by 2000. Then, the Bush administration broke them up...
- phtrivier 6y agoSilly question for a missing piece of info: is the customer in this case paying for high speed internet (fiber I guess ?) and not receiving it, or is the provider just not selling a desired speed yet ? To put it mindly, Internet Providers (as most 20th century telcos, I suppose) have a reputation for being untrustworthy, but in this case it's not clear if it's malvolence or incompetence.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago"it's not clear if it's malvolence or incompetence." That's the plan, they maximise malevolence while obfuscating with incompetence.
- phtrivier 6y ago"Smith be praised, the invisible hand will surely prevent them from prospering in the long run, sure."
- Nextgrid 6y agoWith DSL (given the slow speeds quoted here it would be DSL), the deal is that you pay a fixed price for DSL service, which theoretically will go up to ~24Mbps for ADSL2+ or ~90Mbps for VDSL, but it will degrade to lower speeds depending on the conditions of the wiring. Conveniently this removes any incentive for the ISP to improve the quality of said wiring, and even more conveniently is that you can't determine said quality without signing up to a plan (you can't just connect a modem on a disconnected line - it needs something on the other end, and while it would be trivial for the far-end equipment to allow any modem to connect and sync, it would remove said convenience, so it's not done). I have yet to see a DSL plan whose price scales with the real-world modem sync speed or where you can find out with 100% reliability what kind of speed you would actually be getting.
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoI'm 30 minutes north of Sacramento and can only get 2.5 Mbps from AT&T :/ Most of the time, I choose to use my cell phone as a hotspot in order to reliability video chat for work. We are a 10 minute walk away from I-80, where there is plenty of underground fiber pulls... We pay $60/month... Yay, AT&T!
- pg5 6y agoOof, here in the NC triangle, AT&T fiber is $60/mo for 1 Gbps.
- rudyfink 6y agoIn case anyone else wanted to see the ad, this version has photos of them: https://allthatsinteresting.com/aaron-epstein-att-ad https://allthatsinteresting.com/aaron-epstein-att-ad
- ph2082 6y agoIs AT&T CEO not reachable by email directly? Lot of companies have made CEO email available, so that consumers can reach them directly. One of myfriend sent TATA motor's CEO email detailing about how dealer did not honored commitment. Dealer got reprimanded. My friend got more amount than expected refund.
- Zenst 6y agoProbably, though with secretary filtering etc, that and it's easy to sweep under the carpet - this is an old school way of going public about a problem in that it peer-pressures the CEO to actually respond and under public scrutiny. More modern day approach would be some epic social media post that goes viral or is from somebody with a lot of followers. I would also say today that a hand written letter is more likely to get a response from a CEO than any email.
- joecool1029 6y agoThe largest US ISP does. I had to email Comcast's CEO last year after weeks went by stuck with 3 motorola/arris modems receiving a broken provisioning file. I CC'd every other employee I had spoken with. Prior to this support couldn't escalate, reddit was worthless, and dslreports only further confirmed my issue. Within 12 hours of emailing him this I was on the phone with an engineer that resolved the issue. EDIT: T-Mobile's CTO Neville once dispatched a cell on light truck to my town after I asked him on Twitter. We had a large annual weekend event anticipating >50k attendance and it usually cratered the network locally. Finally with the truck things were mostly usable.
- moonshinefe 6y agoSo he actually was citing Mbps? That's impressive if at his age he's aware of that sort of thing. I was also just thinking that it might be easy to balk at $10k for such a thing to most people, but if I were 90 and the internet was my main source of entertainment / line to the outside world, it might be worth it to me to pay that. Good for him.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoBaud, the canonical unit for transfer speeds, was defined in 1926[0], five years before this guy was born. It was probably somewhat obscure during his teens, but he isn't even much older than the inventors of the Internet who are pushing 80. And, subjectively, it seems like connection speeds were far more present in the Zeitgeist of the 90s. I distinctly remember going from 28kbps to 56kbps to 112kbps, but I would have to look up my current connection's specs. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud
- arthurcolle 6y agoThis is really cool - I wrote a letter to Randall Stephenson in college back when tethering wasn't built into phone plans. I wrote a parable of a man going to the baker, who has listed $100 for unlimited loaves of bread for a month. You buy it and walk outside. It's a beautiful summer day, you can't wait to use your 1 piece of unlimited bread. He sees you excitedly slicing the bread outside the bakery and putting some jam and butter right outside, admiring the pretty girls in summer dresses and you start to enjoy the moment. Baker runs outside, steals the bread from your mouth and said "NO, if you want to use the bread for any sort of bread-related artifacts (bread pudding, sandwiches, croutons) you must pay the mandatory 15 dollar surcharge for every bread artifact produced" I was trying to relate it to tethering. Anyways, the email is probably lost to the sands of time but I was so furious when this stuff was happening around 2011-2015 era. Wrote a solid 2000 words to Randall Stephenson. True asshole for how his reign oversaw the decline in quality in $T Of course he retired last year with infinite money, so that's cool. Good for him. He should take up baking bread. Maybe break them up again? Haha jk, Bell Monopoly 3.0 will probably just be a shitty clone of Bell Monopoly 2.0 with a prettier UI, just like most modern software updates EDIT: I don't use AT&T anymore, Google Fi is alright. Please if any Googlers are watching, tell the Fi team to make a button that lets me delete all voicemails in one action. Had to delete 170 voicemails one by one yesterday and even after a glass of ouzo or three under the belt, by the time I had 35 left I was ready to just jump off a bridge. No, instead they probably are re-re-redesigning Gmail again, which much like theta decay I can feel killing me in the future. Seriously, every time you redesign Gmail I have to explain to my father where the buttons are. Priorities G-Men, please.
- hakfoo 6y agoThe sad thing is that Bell Monopoly 1.0 could at least have been seen somewhat benign by comparison. Ma Bell's network was a remarkable feat of reliable engineering. They provided generations of high-quality unionized jobs and bankrolled the sort of green-field research you can only afford to do when you know you've got a well-protected revenue stream. I wonder what things would have been like if we had chosen regulation or even nationalization rather than sharding the business. If nothing else, we would have been spared decades of inane commercials for competing long-distance providers.
- dehrmann 6y ago> I was paying for 3.5 Mbps., sometimes was only up to 1.5 Mbps > he had been hounding the company about the estimated time of arrival for their fiber optics I suspect he has an ADSL connection and is far from the central office. Normally, I'd say the choices are wait for fiber, check with the cable company, or use 4/5G. I'll give him credit for running that ad, but I feel like some ISP would run fiber in an urban area for that kind of money. This feels just a little like complaining to AOL that your dialup is slow.
- eatbitseveryday 6y ago> This feels just a little like complaining to AOL that your dialup is slow. It is not. He is complaining he cannot switch off his current technology to a faster one while remaining at his address with ATT because there are no options.
- dehrmann 6y agoAOL has no other options, either. The only difference is it doesn't depend on your address.
- gnrlst 6y agoIn Italy, a country often not "idealistically" represented when it comes to technology and infrastructure, I pay 27 EUR for 1 Gbps, uncapped, unlimited.
- jackson1442 6y agoDamn. I’ve been apartment hunting in the DFW metro and most places you’re paying ~$70/mo before taxes and fees and whatnot for gigabit.
- LockAndLol 6y agoItaly needs the same investment in propaganda/marketing as the US; every European country does. People dream about going to the US because they are bombarded with the image that it's better there, not of how good it is in neighboring countries or on the same continent.
- pabs3 6y agoSounds like he should start his own ISP. There was a great HN post a while back about someone in rural America that did that.
- tareqak 6y agoI think there must be some demand in having like an OpenStreetMaps overlay for internet speeds. I am in a position where my home in Canada has only Rogers cable Internet but the home across the small major street (1 lane each way without a divider) has fiber from the other duopoly provider Bell. I called Bell over the years and they just gave me the “we don’t have Internet in your area yet” even though their online lookup service via postal code said it did. Last year, I politely lost my temper and asked the customer service representative for an escalation since it had been 12 years that my family and I have been at this address so what is going on. I was put transferred twice while being put on hold each time and having to repeat my account each time. Eventually, I was transferred to someone in a department that actually had a reason, but it still required digging. Apparently, the builder of my family’s home here made a deal with Rogers to be the exclusive Internet provider. I planned on calling the CRTC after (Canada’s FCC), but I got tired and I have been dealing with an unrelated medical issue. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canadian_Radio-television_and_Telecommunications_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canadian_Radio-te... There are websites like https://broadbandnow.com/California/San-Francisco https://broadbandnow.com/California/San-Francisco that might have city-level and/or postal code level information, but I want street-level information. As I said before in different comments related to Internet speeds, I would assume the migration to remote work would make having this information easily accessible when making a home-buying or renting decision.
- RicoElectrico 6y agoUKE (Polish FCC) uses OSM as a backgroud layer for such map [1] But I think data about internet speed does not belong in OSM, if this is what you mean. It'd be better to have it in another database. [1] https://wyszukiwarka.uke.gov.pl/ https://wyszukiwarka.uke.gov.pl/
- 908B64B197 6y ago> Apparently, the builder of my family’s home here made a deal with Rogers to be the exclusive Internet provider. Was that disclosed to you during the sale? If not, that sounds like you might be able to sue the builder. I wonder why Canada just doesn't open up and allows world-wide players to compete. Sounds like the market is ready for new players.
- mastrsushi 6y agoThe man could switch to any other ISP but choses to spend $10k on this. Insanity
- Nextgrid 6y agoThe other ISPs such as Comcast rely on their own wiring, which presumably isn't available. Any other ISP would still use DSL which means he'll have the exact same speed he has now because the rotten wiring is the bottleneck.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe sad part is how cheap that is. No one reads the papers anymore.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoI got fiber at home a few years ago (France). I was with one operator on ADSL before (Free) and asked their customer service when I can switch. They told me to wait a week for the email which will tell me how to switch. I waited, called and got fed up with them, asked Orange, they came the day after and I am with them since I pay 45€ for 1000/400, the reliability of the fiber is ok (I have to force the synchronization once every 2 months), their equipment is shitty and I installed my own router. Now Free us calling because they finally decided to be a player in the area, after 2 or 3 years. But at least we have competition because of the law (all ISPs must be able to use the existing fiber)