Altice Focusing Fiber on New York City Area

Altice is modifying its fiber-to-the-home strategy, still pushing aggressively in the New York City metro area but being more opportunistic about where to build fiber in its Western markets, CEO Dennis Mathew told analysts Wednesday as the company discussed Q4 2022 financial results. By year's end, Altice expects to have added 900,000 fiber passings for a total of more than 3 million, which will be more than half of its New York City network and nearly a third of its entire U.S. network, he said. All but 50,000 of those 900,000 fiber passings will be in the East, he said. Altice's Optimum East market competes with Verizon, which is 70% overbuilt in its footprint, and with Frontier, who is also building fiber, Mathew said. Optimum West, meanwhile, is 25% overbuilt, much of that by AT&T and the rest by fiber overbuilders in different pockets, he said. He said Altice has other options in its Optimum West footprint without needing to upgrade to FTTH, including its expanded sales effort, finishing a DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade and continuing its network edge-out. Altice added nearly a million new FTTH passings in 2022, including 251,000 in Q4, Mathew said. Most of those were in the New York City metro area, he said. In 2022, Altice added 200,000 new build passings as it edged out its footprint, with the 2023 goal of at least another 150,000, he said. Mathew also said Altice will focus more on packaging its broadband with its mobile offering being done via its T-Mobile mobile virtual network operator. he said. Altice ended the quarter with 4.3 million residential broadband customers, down 100,000 year over year; 2.4 million residential video customers, down 300,000; and 1.8 million telephony customers, down 241,000. Its Optimum Mobile service had 240,000 lines at year's end, up 54,000 year over year, it said. Revenue for the quarter was $2.37 billion, down 6% year over year.