90-year-old man spends $10k on 2 ads in WSJ to tell AT&T CEO about slow internet | Hacker News Reader

90-year-old man spends $10k on 2 ads in WSJ to tell AT&T CEO about slow internet

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207 pointsus0r121 comments

As 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.

A 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.

Yes, and north Hollywood isn’t exactly a rural backwater

absolutely, its shameful.

you're right -- but it's not a good way to compare an entire country.

example : I live in a rural backwater part of the United States and I have access to gigabit+ ISPs.

"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?

This was a specific reference to the comment above about the cost in India. Yes in general would say more reliable than India.

Off the top of my head, my connection has only had ~8 hours of downtime over the last six months. That is around 99% uptime.

We've had gigabit internet in most metro areas of New Zealand for many years now (I pay $110 NZD = ~$80 USD a month to have no data cap either). In mid-March 2019 the infrastructure provider (Chorus) began testing 10Gbps connections with small businesses.

I moved to Seattle in 2016 and found there was only 1 provider who could do 1Gpbs, and even then only to some select locations in the city. Somehow moving into the Amazon/Microsoft center of the tech universe was like going back in time.

Now if we could just resolve the speed of light issue between the bottom of the south pacific and US-EAST1.

4 gbit connections are now available in most metro areas :)

I'm all for progress but... Why?

What possible use could an end user have for a 4gbit connect? The router alone is going to set you back a few hundred bucks.

> What possible use could an end user have for a 4gbit connect?

Who knows. I was excited to do icecc over a gigabit WAN on those "cloud" servers.

4k, 8k and future proofing? How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

Roughly 9~ concurrent streams (if we're talking uncompressed blurays) assuming the network infrastructure is dedicated. OTOH If talking Netflix 4k, the number of streams capable here is just about infinite :)

> How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

1 Gbps can handle about 8¹ to 40² 4K streams.

¹ 2160p60 on Blu-Ray goes up to 100 Mbps

² Typical 4K Netflix streams are in the 15-20 Mbps region, with a recommended Internet bandwidth of 25 Mbps.

If someone hacks into your computer, they want to exfiltrate the data fast, right?

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Future proofing and it gives people the possibility to think big. If most of the country is stuck at 20 Mb, then most people will think in and build 20Mb applications.

Who knows what people will cook up if they are unbridled. Of course limiting users also breeds innovation to overcome the limitations (youtube-dl is a good example), but artificially creating limitations for the sake of money, isn't a good argument IMO.

If you want applications for the future, don't limit it.

You mean well, but to be entirely honest, I'm happy if the 20Mb sentiment persists. Because no matter what you do, there will always be some people who cannot get gigabit (physical limitations, work abroad, etc.), but nobody cares about them.

Plenty of things come to mind that can involve a lot of data

- Docker and other VM images - Backups - 4K video editing synced to shared NASes when working from home - Build and content syncing for gamedev when working from home

4gbit/s is still slow enough for me to spend minutes syncing a mere 100GB, even if I can exclusively saturate that link and not share it with a roommate. That's smaller than some blueray disks and many steam games in their compressed/compiled/processed states for a single platform - no debug symbols, no built object caches, no source assets. It's not uncommon for me to resync a significant portion of that due to mass rebuilds, poorly handled content refactoring, or just switching projects when my local disks (mechanical, SSD, and otherwise) are all full.

I'm living in France in a medium-sized city, and I pay 20€/month ($25) for 1GBps internet (that's actually a 1 year discount, it's gonna be 30€/month).

Also my 4G mobile plan is 60Gb/month for 10€.

Broadband and fibers are about 35€ a month in France with the two providers. They do a single package with phone, internet and TV over internet.

It's misleading to call it 20€/month because of one-off discounts.

I guess it's a FTTLA 1GBps internet.

It's FFTH

I'm living in france too, I pay 40€/mo (~$48) for ~8Gbps fiber.

You seriously get 8 Gbps on anything else than torrents? I get 400 Mbps in Canada and there so many time where I download and I hardly get more than 100 Mbps... Steam and torrents are pretty much the only times I get my full 400 Mbps.

That would mean the servers don't give you more than 100, but your provider does honestly provide you a 400 Mbps channel.

I max out at around 1 Gbps on steam, although I think I might be bottlenecked by my cpu for decompression. Servers that allows clients to pull 8Gbps are very rare.

Torrenting linux iso is indeed very fast :)

GBps != Gbps

Bytes != bits

Yeah sorry, I meant Gbps

It will happen after India gets its own Telco Monopolies. Just give it another year or two.

Unlikely, jio has been operating for more then a couple of years and there’s no sign of this happening. In fact, it’s had the opposite effect of catapulting the digital ecosystem to another level.

Leave broadband, the mobile data rates and caps are exorbitant in US-CA. Back in 2016 I was paying $5.5 for 10GB 4G data in Delhi, and in US its like $10 per GB.

4G service in USA is about $4/GB now.

Well India is at 9 cents/GB now.

How much are technicians are paid in India compared to the US? This should be factored in.

Certainly less, but not by a factor of 40...

The median telecom technician in India[1] make $3,406 USD a year, while a US[2] one makes $55,878 USD a year.

It's certainly not a factor of 40, but at 16x it's still quite significant. I'm pretty sure the population density which is 10x higher can factor for the 2.5x remaining.

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Telecommunications_... [2] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/telecommuni...

Interesting. My latest info was an income difference that is far smaller (around factor 2 to 4 in tech jobs). Thanks for the update.

Canada ranked 208 of 228 countries surveyed in 2020 at an average price of $12.55 (US) / GB.

Intelligence collection / surveillance net tax?

I live in one of the most backward state tier-3 city in India and I have 200mbps unlimited for USD 18$/month

My parents were paying $200 for 8mbps in 1998.

Where was that?

Russia, and in one of the least developed part Vladivostok, Far East.

I'm in rural utah and pay $60 for 1GB. I live in no-mans land and we have decent coverage most states don't though, betting the new administration pushes for more widespread coverage. Plus, Starlink might be a game changer for that as well.

I live in central London, about 5 minutes away from Google HQ. Here on I can only get 10Mbps ADSL2+ connections. I ended using a mobile broadband modem for the whole house, at least it gets me up to 20Mbps.

Now, before living here, I was living in Rio de Janeiro state in Brazil. I had 300Mbps fiber connection cheaper than the price I'm paying for shit connection in London.

You haven't got FTC then ?

Worth checking Virgin if you haven't already or yeah going for 5g (3 and some others offer this in parts of London).

I had thought most of London had access to really good options here but obviously I was wrong!

I fell into that trap once - rented in a listed building with ADSL that will never be upgraded.

Now Hyperoptic (a Gigabit provider) is my second question for any letting agent or landlord, without it head straight for the door.

Hyperoptic is lightyears ahead of anyone else, because they offer 1 Gbps synchronous broadband. Synchronous is the key here, because absolute majority of other providers usually only offer upload speed that is 10-20% of download speed.

I have AT&T 1Gbps fiber both up and down on my street here in the US. I agree it is blazing fast.

I have a condo in a building with gigabit fiber access but they won’t provide to my unit for no reason (it’s a 4 unit brownstone), so pay $65/m for 10 Mbps. Oh, and when I saturate the uplink (~800kbps) they cut off the entire conn for ~30 seconds.

It's worse in Canada than it is in large parts of the US. Typical deregulation/capitalism will save us B.S.

It's not deregulation it's regulatory capture. The regulations are put in place to keep new entrants out. Just look how fiercely even small rural ISPs are attacking Starlink. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/isps-step-up-fig...

Good internet, is not about how rich the country is, but how the regulatory system is set up.

This 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.

The 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.

I 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-te...

There are websites like 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.

UKE (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/

> 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.

In the US, https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov

Although it is usually ~ one year behind.

That is not accurate in reality. Just because a provider is reported for an area doesn't mean they are obligated to service the entire area.

The data presented is unreliable and so a potentially valuable tool like this becomes worthless.

This 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.

I was shocked just how cheap a bill board actually is. Thousand dollars gets you a few days worth of impressions

I 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.

That's just an ad campaign for a jewelry store.

https://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/22062/why_does_some...

In Italy, a country often not "idealistically" represented when it comes to technology and infrastructure, I pay 27 EUR for 1 Gbps, uncapped, unlimited.

Damn. 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.

Italy 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.

Is 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?

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

I am aware of the concept, but curious if this is the case here.

Until 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.

What specific policies has Utah adopted to incentivize these speeds?

According 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".

I agree, he is crazy, my kind of crazy. I hope it works out for him and his community.

My first thought was, this man is my hero.

In case anyone else wanted to see the ad, this version has photos of them: https://allthatsinteresting.com/aaron-epstein-att-ad

So 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.

Baud, 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

I 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...

There's an excellent movie along the same lines, called 'Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri'

Is 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.

AT&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...

Is 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.

Probably, 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.

The 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.

I'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!

Oof, here in the NC triangle, AT&T fiber is $60/mo for 1 Gbps.

I 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)

> 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.

> 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.

AOL has no other options, either. The only difference is it doesn't depend on your address.

Silly 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.

"it's not clear if it's malvolence or incompetence."

That's the plan, they maximise malevolence while obfuscating with incompetence.

"Smith be praised, the invisible hand will surely prevent them from prospering in the long run, sure."

With 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.

With 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?

Not really, no.

Yes

5G 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.

5g != 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.

Agreed. 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).

Can't you get an external antenna such as the Huawei 5G AF9E: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AF9E-boosting-frequency-3300-4200MH...

Hardware is not a problem, but getting a 4g or 5g service plan for PC instead of mobile.

It is almost impossible to find an for internet only data. All of the providers bundle it with TV or phone.

So if you already have a phone plan and want a separate plan to say travel and connect with your business laptop, there may not be an option for you.

There's no technical reason you can't use a phone plan in an LTE router. The only problem might be data caps, but if you can snag an uncapped plan it's absolutely a viable solution.

Reminds me of "Old man yells at cloud" [0].

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud

Sounds like he should start his own ISP. There was a great HN post a while back about someone in rural America that did that.

The man could switch to any other ISP but choses to spend $10k on this. Insanity

The 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.

The sad part is how cheap that is. No one reads the papers anymore.

Starlink is for you.

Isn'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.

Starlink is for everybody that is not happy with their current providers.

He can expect what he likes, maybe he will get it, maybe not.

X 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".

You wish.

I'm from a third world country. Stop with the off-putting virtue-signalling. Everyone knows what is meant by the term, even if it isn't necessarily an accurate representation of the relative development of countries.

As 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.

But 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?

Bay area has okay internet, but nothing outstanding. Gigabit is unavailable in most areas, even in Google headquarter land (Mountain View).

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