Altice USA is accelerating its fiber deployment strategy across its Optimum and Suddenlink footprint to build on the growing demand for fiber connections. The Altice fiber expansion is expected to pass more than two thirds of the company’s entire footprint, expecting to reach 6.5 million passings, over the next four years.
The company has been building a fiber broadband network in its Optimum territory in the New York tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) with 1.2 million fiber passings available for sales as of the end of last year.
Suddenlink’s, construction is expected to begin this year in areas of Texas. Additional regions that will benefit from this fiber expansion plan include areas of Arizona, California, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma and West Virginia.
With these new builds, Altice is confronting fiber competitors head on, namely Frontier and Verizon. Frontier has ambitious fiber plans, going so far as to say it will become the largest “pure play” fiber broadband provider in the U.S.
Fiber not only sets up a more competitive offer, providing subscribers with faster speeds, better reliability and lower latency, but it also fuels providers with improved profits, as AT&T has witnessed.
“Altice USA is proud to announce plans to invest further in our fiber deployment strategy by accelerating the build of a 100% fiber broadband network capable of delivering multi-gig speeds across our Optimum and Suddenlink footprint,” said Dexter Goei, Altice USA Chief Executive Officer, in a prepared statement about the Altice fiber expansion. “Fiber is the future and given the progress we have made at Optimum with our fiber expansion, we’re excited to build on that success and break ground later this year at Suddenlink to bring our advanced network to more customers and communities.”
Altice USA joins a growing number of legacy cable MSOs who are increasingly turning to FTTP over DOCSIS technologies for their long term broadband strategy.
The fact that they have not gotten to 3/4 of the footprint by 2022 speaks volumes.. their goal doesn’t even seem to be 100% of the footprint, just like Verizon, which is pathetically SAD!!