Altice USA says fiber is the ‘logical end state’ of coaxial cable

Altice USA isn’t afraid to march to the beat of its own drum and actually thinks it’s going about network upgrades the smart way by jumping straight to fiber rather than following other cable incumbents in pursuing DOCSIS 4.0. The operator recently laid out a plan to overbuild its hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network to blanket 6.5 million locations with fiber by 2025. Altice USA EVP of corporate finance and development Nick Brown said the decision to make that move was a “no brainer” for the company, but acknowledged that it’s in a slightly different position than fellow cable giants Comcast and Charter Communications. Brown stated Altice USA’s own experience and that of its sister companies in Europe gave it better insight into what the transition to fiber would look like in terms of costs and returns, leaving it unafraid to take the leap. But it also already faces “a lot of fiber-based competition relative to others,” especially from Verizon Fios in its legacy Cablevision footprint in the eastern part of the US. Altice has already upgraded its head ends and backbone rings with fiber. Since DOCSIS would require it to push fiber deeper and deeper into the network anyway, Brown said it made sense to go all-in to pull forward the benefits full fiber has to offer. “The FTTH end-to-end glass network that we’re deploying here in the US for us is pretty much the end state, the logical end state, of a coax upgrade anyway,” Brown argued.