90-Year Old Man’s Viral Ad Forces AT&T To Take Action And Upgrade His Internet

Are you experiencing slow internet speeds in your area? Sure, you might call in to complain, but how often does that actually result in something being done? Rarely, we can only assume, but it seems that maybe a good course of action would be to take out an ad in a newspaper to get the attention of your local internet company.

We say this because thanks to the actions of 90-year old Aaron Epstein, AT&T was forced to quickly scramble and upgrade the internet in his area from an “up to 3Mbps” DSL connection to an AT&T fiber service with speeds of up to 300Mbps. Epstein was upset at the speeds offered in his area and spent $10,000 on a quarter page ad in the Wall Street Journal, hoping that AT&T investors would see it and pressure the company into doing something.

It worked because shortly after the ad was published, media outlets caught wind of it and ran with the story where he was interviewed. The ad itself also made an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. AT&T claims that they already had plans to upgrade the internet in Epstein’s location, but the carrier had given a slightly different statement from a couple of weeks back.

As ArsTechnica points out, if they had intended to upgrade all along, they would have said so and could have avoided the controversy. Either way, we suppose it’s a good thing as now Epstein is able to enjoy speedy unlimited internet service.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: AT&T, Social Hit