Altice USA races to blanket Fios, Frontier areas with fiber by 2025

Altice USA laid out a plan to deploy fiber to 6.5 million locations, or two-thirds of its entire footprint, by the end of 2025, planning to focus heavily on areas where it competes with Verizon’s Fios service and Frontier Communications. In 2022, it is targeting 1.1 million fiber passings in its Optimum footprint and 200,000 passings in its Suddenlink territory, for a total of 1.3 million new locations in 2022. It expects to add another 1 million fiber passings in its Optimum footprint in 2023 and 700,000 in 2024. For Suddenlink it will deploy to 600,000 locations in 2023, 900,000 in 2024 and 800,000 in 2025. Altice expects to spend between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion to fund its build in 2022, up from around $1.2 billion in 2021. The company previously said it planned to add 1 million fiber passings in 2022, primarily in areas where its footprint overlaps with Verizon’s Fios service, and another 1 million to 1.5 million in 2023. It ended 2021 with 1.2 million fiber to the home passings.