Altice USA’s Optimum brand is the focus of a new Connecticut Attorney General probe

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong opened an investigation into Altice USA’s Optimum internet service after hundreds of consumers alleged the operator failed to deliver promised speeds. The probe comes shortly after Tong’s office inked a $60 million settlement deal with Frontier Communications over consumer complaints about its marketing practices. Tong’s office said it received nearly 500 complaints against Altice over the past five years. The majority of these have come from subscribers on Optimum’s 300 Megabits per second (Mbps) or 400 Mbps service tiers who conducted speed tests and found they were not getting the speeds they ordered. But Tong's office noted consumers also complained about poor technical support and service fees, including a $3.50 “network enhancement fee” that was tacked on to internet customer bills. Among other things, Tong’s office has asked Altice to provide records of consumer complaints as well as details about its internet plan marketing, any network performance analyses that were conducted and documentation of how it spent money collected from the network enhancement fee.