Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Synergee)

A man who has been an AT&T customer since 1960 has a message for CEO John Stankey about the company's failure to upgrade DSL areas to modern Internet service. Aaron Epstein, 90, is so frustrated by his 3Mbps Internet plan that he took out a Wall Street Journal ad in today's print edition in order to post an open letter to Stankey.

"Dear Mr. Stankey: AT&T prides itself as a leader in electronic communications. Unfortunately, for the people who live in N. Hollywood, CA 91607, AT&T is now a major disappointment," Epstein wrote in the letter.

Epstein paid $1,100 to run the ad for one day in the Manhattan and Dallas editions of today's Journal, he told Ars in a phone interview. He chose the Manhattan edition to reach investors who might want to pressure AT&T into upgrading its network and Dallas because that's where AT&T is headquartered, he said.

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  Jared Mauch installed about five miles' worth of this fiber cable. [credit: Jared Mauch ]

The old saying "if you want something done right, do it yourself" usually isn't helpful when your problem is not having good Internet service. But for one man in rural Michigan named Jared Mauch, who happens to be a network architect, the solution to not having good broadband at home was in fact building his own fiber-Internet service provider.

"I had to start a telephone company to get [high-speed] Internet access at my house," Mauch explained in a recent presentation about his new ISP that serves his own home in Scio Township , which is next to Ann Arbor, as well as a few dozen other homes in Washtenaw County.

Mauch, a senior network architect at Akamai in his day job, moved into his house in 2002. At that point, he got a T1 line when 1.5Mbps was "a really great Internet connection," he said. As broadband technology advanced, Mauch expected that an ISP would eventually wire up his house with cable or fiber. It never happened.

Enlarge / A Verizon FiOS truck in Manhattan on September 15, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection | Gado )

Verizon has agreed to bring FiOS fiber-to-the-home service to another 500,000 households in New York City by July 2023, settling a lawsuit over Verizon's failure to wire up the entire city as required in a franchise agreement.

"Today's settlement will ensure that 500,000 households that previously lacked Verizon broadband access because of a corporate failure to invest in the necessary infrastructure will have the option of fiber broadband, and create critical cost competition in areas where today only one provider exists," NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said in an announcement last week . The settlement's full text is available here .

New York City sued Verizon in March 2017 , saying the company failed to complete a citywide fiber rollout by 2014 as required in its cable-TV franchise agreement. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Verizon said it had brought its fiber network to 2.2 million of NYC's 3.1 million households.

Enlarge / A trio of Wi-Fi 6 Eero Pro devices like these should provide excellent Wi-Fi coverage and performance for nearly any home. (credit: Eero )

This Tuesday, Eero—one of the first and most popular Wi-Fi-mesh providers—announced a new hardware and software program which targets ISPs rather than retail customers. Ars spoke about the new program at length with Nick Weaver, Eero founder and CEO, and Mark Sieglock, Eero's GM of Software Services.

The short version of Eero for Service Providers is simple: deploy new Eero 6 series hardware, let your customers self-install using a co-branded app with the ISP's own name on it, and provide the ISP with Eero Insight, a dashboard allowing them to view metrics from the entire fleet-level down to individual households. The telemetry exposed to the ISP includes outages, speed-test data, client network topology, RF diagnostics, and more.

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  ISPs using Eero Insight can check for network outages using Eero telemetry, with configurable alert levels. [credit: Eero ]

Weaver told us that the vanilla Eero Insight dashboard itself wasn't the whole story, though. The metrics, charts, and graphs the dashboard exposes can also be accessed via API, allowing larger providers to seamlessly integrate the data into their own, existing dashboards.