Altice USA said its fiber-to-the-home network is now reaching more than 500,000 homes, covering about 10% of its Optimum-branded footprint.
“We view fiber-to-the-home as an end state of the network which is superior to other future cable DOCSIS network upgrades,” said Dexter Goei, CEO of Altice USA, to investment analysts on Tuesday during the cable operator’s third-quarter earnings call.
“We believe future iterations of DOCSIS will end up with a fiber deep node+0 architecture anyway,” Goei added.
Related: Altice USA Revenue, Cash Flow Flat in Q3
Altice USA’s network evolution comes as a direct correlation develops between customers taking faster internet speeds and those using more data. Goes said that customers with 200 Mbps speeds and higher use an average of 290 GB per month of data, a rate that was up 20% in the third quarter and that was 75% higher than those who take less than 200 Mbps.
“Given the proliferation of new streaming services, we feel very well positioned to benefit from continued growth in demand for our broadband services which is at the heart of everything we do,” Goei said.
Altice USA saw its broadband customer base rise by 15,000 users in Q3, comparable to a year-ago performance of 14,000.
Slow start for Altice Mobile
The company reported customer growth of just 15,000 subscriber lines for its new consumer wireless service, Altice Mobile.
Goes said it’s “a little too early” to be concerned about that, "given that we're just about two months into the launch. And we still haven't opened up all of our channels and we still haven't really targeted non-customers. I think as we go broader which is really let's call it Black Friday into Christmas season and going into the first quarter of next year that's going to be something that I'm happy to share with them.”
