Ah, the story of ISPs making promises they can’t deliver — does it ever get old? Ars Technica brings us the sad tale of Dave Mortimer, an AT&T customer in the town of Lowell, Michigan. Before Mortimer moved into his new house in Lowell, he asked whether AT&T would be able to provide it with a broadband connection of at least 20Mbps. AT&T said that it could and, what’s more, AT&T’s own U-Verse availability check said that it could. After buying and moving into his new house, however, he learned the awful truth.

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Contra AT&T’s promises, it turns out the best the carrier could deliver his house was DSL service with peak speeds of 768Kbps that in no way, shape or form comes close to resembling “broadband.”

“Half the time, websites won’t even load,” a despondent Mortimer tells Ars Technica.

Mortimer has been lobbying his town to build out its own high-speed fiber network since AT&T doesn’t seem all that interested in building out significantly faster service to the area. However, Michigan has adopted laws that limit towns’ abilities to build their own municipal broadband networks, so this idea was a nonstarter.

There was a sort-of happy ending to Mortimer’s story, however, and it involved kicking AT&T to the curb. To read about it, check out Ars‘ full report by clicking here.

AND WHO COULD FORGET THIS: AT&T wants to know why a town is building a 1Gbps network when it already offers 6Mbps DSL