Altice USA yesterday revealed plans to reach more customers with its fiber to the home (FTTH) architecture over the next four years. The cable MSO now expects to pass 6.5 million premises with FTTH by the end of 2025 across its Optimum and Suddenlink footprints. The figure represents more than two thirds of Altice USA’s entire footprint.
The fiber deployment growth will primarily occur within Suddenlink, which will see 2.5 million of the expected homes passed.
Ongoing FTTH roll outs in Optimum’s New York tri-state (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) territory have seen 1.2 million passings available for marketing as of December 31, 2021. The new deployments within Suddenlink’s markets will start this year in Texas, with FTTH on tap in areas of Arizona, California, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Altice USA expects to achieve about 1.1 million incremental FTTH passings across the Optimum footprint (including 300,000 in Connecticut) and approximately 200,000 incremental FTTH passings across the Suddenlink footprint – a total of 1.3 million incremental FTTH passings – by the end of this year.
“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 CEO. “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.”
Concurrently, Altice USA revealed that it expects to increase cash capex in fiscal year 2022 to approximately $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, a figure that excludes capex associated with potential subsidized rural broadband construction initiatives.
