Altice USA said it is rebranding its wireless service across all its business units under the Optimum Mobile name, a move the company said is the first step in the transition to one consumer brand across all its connectivity products. 

The switch to Optimum Mobile will officially occur on July 25. Altice had branded the wireless service, offered via a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) agreement with T-Mobile, across the country under the Altice Mobile brand. Its cable and broadband services are branded as Optimum in its metropolitan New York area markets and under the Suddenlink Communications name in its West and Mid-Atlantic states. Altice USA operates in 21 states across the country.

“Today’s consumer demands reliability, speed and ubiquity when it comes to connectivity,” Altice USA president of telecommunications and chief operating officer Hakim Boubazine said in a press release. “As we unify our brands under one Optimum brand, we will deliver on our promise to provide a consistent and reliable converged connectivity experience to all our customers inside and outside the home.  So, whether it’s Gigabit speed internet service or Optimum Mobile service, customers can expect the most reliable coverage and speed wherever they are.”

The move also comes days after the company launched Optimum Stream, a 4K-capable Android TV device that is free to its 1 Gigabit-per-second broadband-only customers. 

Altice USA first came on the U.S. cable scene with its $9.1 billion purchase of  Suddenlink Communications in 2015. It purchased Cablevision Systems, which originated the Optimum brand, in 2016 for $17.7 billion. 

The Communications Workers of America said 52 Altice USA employees based Beckley and Logan, West Virginia are “ready to fight for job security” as they prep for their first collective bargaining negotiator with the cable company.

“Altice’s workers and customers deserve better than this,” said Patrick Adkins, a member of CWA’s bargaining team from CWA Local 2002, which represents workers serving Altice’s Suddenlink brand in West Virginia. “It’s time for Altice to come to the bargaining table and negotiate a fair contract with CWA members to stop this trend of outsourcing that’s harming our communities.”

“As Altice continues to expand its company footprint, CWA members in West Virginia are ready to fight for a fair contract that protects good union jobs and improves the quality of service for customers by returning work to highly-skilled union members instead of contracting it out to cheap labor,” added Rob Lynch, a CWA bargaining team member from CWA Local 2007, which also serves Altice workers in West Virginia.

Altice USA responded with this statement: "We are committed to bargaining in good faith under the standards of the NLRA to work towards a mutually acceptable agreement, and, in this case, are fully engaged in discussions with the CWA." 

Altice USA said it has launched 1-Gbps broadband service in two more Suddenlink territories – Alexandra and Pineville, La., while also boosting the speeds of certain other tiers for no additional cost.

In addition to the 1-Gig (downstream) residential offering in two areas, the operator has also bumped its 75 Mbps and 100 Mbps tiers to 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps, respectively. Suddenlink also offers a 50 Mbps service in those markets.

In Louisiana, Suddenlink also offers 1-Gig in areas such as Lake Charles and Sulphur, Bossier City. Suddenlink started to offer a DOCSIS 3.0-based 1-Gig service in July 2015 as part of a broader “Project GigaSpeed” initiative that envisioned offering gigabit speeds to 90% of Suddenlink's footprint by 2017. That initiative is continuing under Altice.

Suddenlink has been asked for pricing details in the new 1-Gig markets. In other areas, it’s been selling standalone 1-Gig (paired with a 50 Mbps upstream) for about $109 per month, and for less when bundled with other services. In April, Suddenlink added an unlimited data option for its two fastest tiers in a given market. Those complement the MSO's usage-based plans that charge extra ($10 for an additional bucket of 50 Gigabytes) when customers exceed their monthly limit a third time. 

Update: Suddenlink confirmed that 1-Gig pricing is uniform across markets, and that the price on stand-alone 1-Gig is now $99 per month. 

“Today’s announcement is the next step in Operation GigaSpeed, the company-wide plan we announced in August of 2014,” Altice USA Vice President of Suddenlink Operations Robbie Lee said, in a statement. “In sharp contrast to other large providers, which are offering a Gigabit service primarily to a few neighborhoods in large urban markets, we’re pleased to be making our Suddenlink Gigabit service available in all of the neighborhoods and to all of the households and businesses we serve throughout Alexandria and Pineville.” 

Suddenlink is the latest U.S. MVPD to complete an integration with Hulu, announcing Thursday that the SVOD service is now available  to the MSO’s subs with TiVo-powered set-top boxes.

Suddenlink customers with Hulu subscriptions  can access the OTT service by tuning to channel 3001 on their TiVo box and signing in with their Hulu credentials. Customers without a Hulu account are in line for a free, one-week trial or can subscribe via the on-screen app or by visiting www.hulu.com/start/suddenlink.

Update: The version of Hulu offered via Suddenlink, however, is absent some content. Per the Suddenlink/Hulu site: "CW and Univision content is not available through Hulu on your cable provider’s set top box. You may still be able to watch this content through other Hulu-supported devices."  Suddenlink has been asked for the reason. Cablevision's web site about its Hulu integration deal does not mention any limitation of Hulu content. 

Update 2: Due to streaming rights, content from select partners (CW and Univision) isn't available on certain devices, Multichannel News has learned.  However, users can still stream that content through other Hulu-supported devices. Additionally, this disclaimer for Cablevision subscribers is mentioned here. 

“We’re continually working on innovative ways to satisfy our customers’ entertainment demands,” said Suddenlink Chief Programming Officer Kathy Payne, in a statement. “Our network investments allow us to deliver Internet content from providers like Hulu using Internet connections that generally are the fastest and top-rated in areas we serve.”

Suddenlink announced plans to integrate Hulu’s SVOD service about a year ago. Suddenlink, now part of Altice, also integrates Netflix on its TiVo platform.  Rovi is acquiring TiVo for $1.1 billion. 

Last month, Cablevision Systems, which is the process of being acquired by Altice, became the first U.S. MVPD to distribute Hulu on set-top boxes, enabling it with ActiveVideo’s CloudTV StreamCast, a technology that converts user interfaces, video and other content from Web formats to formats that can be rendered and displayed by non-IP or incompatible IP set-tops.

Hulu has also announced distribution deals with several other MVPDs and ISPs,  including AT&T, Armstrong, Atlantic Broadband, Mediacom Communications, Midcontinent Communications and WideOpenWest (WOW!).

Hulu is also developing an OTT-TV skinny-bundle service that would presumably compete with some of its new MVPD partners.

At a dinner last week celebrating his 20th year as host of HBO’s sports magazine show Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, veteran TV journalist Bryant Gumbel said the show’s mission to cover the issues, personalities and controversies of the sports world hasn’t changed since its launch in 1995.

And, in Gumbel’s view, that keeps his Peabody Award-winning show unique.

More than 220 episodes and 28 Sports Emmys later, Gumbel said that not enough of today’s sports media outlets are as committed to delivering hard-hitting, investigative news stories as Real Sports is.

“I still think what passes for sports coverage is sadly sycophantic,” the 67-year-old Gumbel told The Wire during the dinner at New York’s Aureole restaurant. “Obviously there are exceptions — I’d like to see more exceptions — but the money has become so big now and there’s so much competition that it’s di_ cult for a show that’s interested in pursuing truth to find subjects to do it with, because they all have their own networks.”

Gumbel called the athlete-supported The Player’s Tribune website a shining example of the new sports outlets that blur the lines of news, social media and public relations. On that site, athletes post their own stories and videos in an effort to talk directly to the fans.

“This is what it’s come to?” Gumbel said. “That’s where you go to tell your story? And we’re supposed to believe that? The version [of a story] you want is the one we’re supposed to buy — no questions asked? That’s a bad world.”

As to whether today’s sports media has tainted the viewer’s perception of sports news, Gumbel said he’s not sure the modern viewer “can discern the difference between a well-researched, objective, critical piece and an infomercial. My suspicion is not, and that’s kind of sad.”

Gumbel’s show returns with a new episode on Sunday, Dec. 22.

— R. Thomas Umstead

Cristiano Ronaldo’s Altice Ads Headed to U.S. Airwaves

When European telecom giant Altice gains a foothold in the United States — after completing the purchase of Suddenlink Communications, expected to happen before year’s end — U.S. audiences will start seeing the French telecommunications firm’s ads with its new spokesman, Portugese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.

Ronaldo is one of the world’s bestknown athletes. At the London premiere of his self-produced year-in-the-life film, Ronaldo, he was given a plaque commemorating his stature as the “most liked” person on Facebook.

Altice said the Real Madrid star’s “speed and power complement the international development of the Altice Group’s core businesses: high-speed broadband (fiber and 4G), content and media.”

Altice ads featuring “CR7” will soon be seen in Portugal, France and Israel, and adapted later in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic and the United States. Altice also is buying Cablevision Systems, for $17.7 billion, but that deal is expected to close after the Suddenlink merger.

— Mike Farrell

Suddenlink Communications announced on its official blog on October 28 that the MSO has deployed its residential 1-Gig offering in three more markets – Bossier City, La.; and Tyler and Victoria, Texas.

A developer for Santa Rita Ranch, an area near the Georgetown, Texas, area, announced separately that Suddenlink is now offering 1-Gig to residential subscribers there. 

Update: Suddenlink announced on November 2 that it has also rolled out 1-gig in its entire Georgetown, Texas, systems, as well as Jonesboro and Pocahontas, Ark. With all of them factored in, Suddenlink said it has expanded 1-Gig to six new markets. 

As has been the case in prior 1 Gig launches, Suddenlink also increased certain other residential Internet speeds at no additional cost to customers.  With each 1 Gigabit launch, residential high-speed Internet customers with current download speeds up to 75 and 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) have been moved to services with download speeds up to 100 and 200 Mbps, respectively, at no added charge. Suddenlink’s standard residential Internet download speeds in these communities are now up to 50, 100, and 200 Mbps, along with the now available up to 1 Gig service.

Local business owners also have access to Suddenlink’s 1 Gig service, along with customized services that Suddenlink has offered for many years that are capable of multi-Gigabit speeds.

To date, Suddenlink has launched an up to 1 Gigabit service in the following 24 areas and a number of nearby communities.

July 2015 

• Missouri: Nixa
• North Carolina: Greenville, Rocky Mount
• Texas: Bryan, College Station

September 2015

• Arkansas: Russellville
• Oklahoma: Stillwater
• Texas: Andrews, Big Spring, Huntsville, Kingwood, Lubbock, Midland

October 2015

• Arizona: Flagstaff
• Arkansas: Jonesboro, Pocahontas
• Louisiana: Bossier City
• Oklahoma: Enid
• Texas: Abilene, Georgetown, Lufkin, Terrell, Tyler, Victoria

Suddenlink, which is being acquired by Altice Group, introduced its 1-Gig (downstream) offering, paired with a 50 Mbps upstream, in July using DOCSIS 3.0 technology.

The standalone offering runs about $109 per month, but comes at a reduced price when paired with other Suddenlink services. All of Suddenlink’s residential broadband services come with usage-based policies that charge extra for additional buckets of data if customers exceed their monthly allotments.  The top data plan posted online is fitted with a monthly soft cap of 550 gigabytes.

Here’s a list of other Suddenlink markets that offer the 1-Gig residential service:

-Arkansas: Jonesboro and Russellville.

-Arizona: Flagstaff.

-Missouri: Nixa and Ozark.

-North Carolina: Greenville and Rocky Mount.

-Oklahoma: Enid and Stillwater.

-Texas: Abilene, Andrews, Big Spring, Bryan, College Station, Huntsville, Kingwood, Lubbock, Lufkin, Midland, and Terrell.

The cable universe is shrinking.

Consolidation, competition and new viewing habits are irrevocably changing the pay TV landscape, with more contraction expected as larger deals close and smaller cable systems are snapped up by their larger peers.

But unlike years past, when deals were driven by a desire to cluster operations more efficiently, the coming consolidation wave seems sparked purely by a need to get bigger — bulking up to roll out new services more effectively and cheaply across a broader base, and to help keep rising programming costs in check. Cable operators aren’t the only ones looking for scale. AT&T completed its $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV in July, raising its video-subscriber tally to 26.3 million customers and vaulting the telco to the top of the list of multichannel video-programming distributors (MVPDs). Comcast, which abandoned its $67 billion pursuit of Time Warner Cable in April when it determined regulators would not sign off on the deal, is still a solid No. 2 with 22.3 million subscribers.

Charter Communications, which started the whole consolidation wave in 2014 when it began a dogged pursuit of Time Warner Cable, finally won that prize with its May agreement to purchase the 10.8 million-subscriber TWC for $78.7 billion. That deal is expected to close by the end of the year, and with Charter’s $10 billion purchase of Bright House Networks — also expected to close in December — the Stamford, Conn.-based operator will have 17.2 million customers with which to spread the operating acumen of CEO Tom Rutledge.

CATCHING THE WAVE

Charter is expected to at least look at other potential acquisitions, but others are not sitting idly by. European telecom giant Altice agreed to purchase a 70% interest in Suddenlink Communications for $9.1 billion, and has said it will use the midsized St. Louis-based cable company as a vehicle to expand its U.S. presence.

Already, Altice chairman Patrick Drahi has named Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems as potential targets. And though Cox has insisted it isn’t for sale — and there is some doubt as to whether Altice could pay Cablevision’s price — there is no doubt that further consolidation is coming.

In a recent report, MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett said possible acquisition targets could include some of the larger operators at the lower end of the top 10 — Mediacom Communications, Cable One or WideOpenWest.

“It would be foolish to dismiss the idea that any or all of them might be acquired,” Moffett wrote.

And the cable industry has a long history of acquisition. For example, only three of the Top 25 MSOs of 1985 still exist today (Cox, Cablevision and Comcast); the rest have been assumed by other entities. Five of the Top 25 of 1995 are in business today — Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox, Cablevision and Charter — with TWC expected to be swallowed by Charter by year-end.

Cable operators stopped growing their basic-video subscriber rolls more than a decade ago. The industry peaked at about 66.9 million total subscribers in 2001, and in 2014, it finished the year with a total of about 54 million subscribers, according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. Broadband, for years the profit center of the business, emerged as the subscriber leader last year — the first year that cable broadband customers exceeded video subscribers.

While that had been anticipated — and in some cases, encouraged — for years, cable operators are beginning to turn the corner on basic-video subscriber growth. The four top cable service providers have drastically reduced their customer losses over the past three years; Comcast alone has cut losses by nearly 75% since 2010.

Telcos, which had been engines of video-subscriber growth for more than a decade, began reporting losses for the first time in the second quarter. AT&T said it lost about 22,000 U-verse TV customers in the most recent quarter, while Verizon Communications saw its growth cool considerably, adding 26,000 FiOS TV customers in the period compared to 100,000 additions in the prior year.

At the same time, satellite subscriber growth has stalled — DirecTV lost 133,000 net subscribers in the second quarter, well below the 60,000 additions in the first three months of the year. No. 2 satellite company Dish Network lost 81,000 net subscribers in the second quarter, almost twice the 44,000 it lost during the previous year.

Dish Network lost about 79,000 net subscribers in 2014, compared to a gain of 1,000 in 2013.

DISRUPTING THE DISRUPTOR

As satellite- and telco-TV service stagnates, a new distribution model is disrupting TV’s early disruptor — cable operators. Over-the-top services like Sling TV, HBO Now and Sony’s PlayStation Vue have burst onto the scene with much fanfare, and pay TV operators who may have dismissed those services in the past are now scrambling to come up with their own solutions.

In the second quarter, pay TV lost its traditional growth engines — satellite TV was down 284,000 customers while telco TV providers lost 2,000 subscribers — and perennial loss leader cable cut its losses almost in half to 280,000 from 534,000 a year ago.

Indeed, pay TV subscriber growth dipped to a record low of -0.7% in the past 12 months, according to Moffett. The pay TV industry lost 566,000 subscribers in the second quarter, 76% worse than the 321,000 it lost during the same period in 2014.

With more OTT services slated to launch later this year — Verizon is expected to debut its “mobile-only” Go90 service in the late summer and other programmers are considering launching their own direct-to-consumer services — cord-cutting will likely get worse. And cable operators will likely meet the challenge by trying to add scale.

But just how many customers will migrate over remains to be seen. Years of consolidation have narrowed the number of large available properties. While there are about 660 cable operators and 5,208 cable systems in the United States, more than 80% of the nation’s 116 million TV households are represented by the top eight MVPDs.

And unlike other years when an MVPD could buy the operator below it on the list and move up several spots on the list, today the fifth-largest provider (Verizon) could could buy the next three largest distributors below it and still be stuck at No. 5 with 13.7 million customers, behind Dish Network’s 13.9 million subscribers.

To see the current and historic lists of Top 25 MVPDs, please click here.

Moving forward with its previously announced Operation GigaSpeed initiative, Suddenlink Communications said Thursday that it has lit up a 1 Gbps (downstream) residential broadband service in an initial batch of markets – Bryan-College Station, Texas; Nixa, Mo.; and Greenville and Rocky Mount, N.C.

Tied in, residential high-speed Internet customers in those markets who are on two other speed tiers will get a free speed boost – those on the 75 Mbps (downstream) service will now get 100 Mbps, and subs who take the 100-Meg tier will be upped to 200 Mbps. The MSOs standard residential downstream speeds in this initial batch of markets will be up to 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps and the new 1-Gig offering.

Suddenlink did not announce pricing on the new 1-Gig service, but an official noted that it would be “competitively priced.” With discounts available through new customer promotional offers service bundles, residential Internet services from Suddenlink now range from $35 to around $100 per month.

According to pricing data for Suddenlink’s system in Bryan, Texas, obtained by Multichannel News, the standalone 1-Gig service, which is paired with an upstream that maxes out at 50 Mbps, sells for about $109 per month (customers can rent a WiFi-enabled modem for $10 per month or a stand-alone modem for $5 per month). A source familiar with the service indicated that 1-Gig would sell for a lower monthly price when bundled with other Suddenlink services.

Like other Suddenlink residential broadband services, the new 1-Gig tier will have a monthly data plan whereby customers can purchase buckets of additional data if they exceed their monthly allotment. Information about it is posted here, noting that the MSO’s  “monthly data plans have proven to be more than sufficient for substantially all customers.” 

Suddenlink confirmed that it is currently using DOCSIS 3.0 technology to deliver the new offering. “With equipment upgrades and channel bonding, we are able to deliver more than 1 Gig to the modem,” a Suddenlink official said via email.

State-of-the-art DOCSIS 3.0 modem chips from suppliers such as Intel and Broadcom can bond up to 32 downstream channels – enough to support downstream bursts of 1.2 Gbps in North American systems that use 6MHz-wide channels, and up to 1.6 Gbps on EuroDOCSIS systems that utilize 8MHz-wide channels. DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging platform specified by CableLabs, is gunning for multi-gigabit speeds. Some cable operators are expected to start some small, initial DOCSIS 3.1 deployments by late this year.

Suddenlink’s technical approach will enable it to offer 1-Gig service on a broad basis.

“In contrast to companies like Google and AT&T, which are generally offering a Gigabit service only to a few neighborhoods in primarily urban markets, Suddenlink is making its service available to all households passed by the Suddenlink network in the listed communities and will do the same in other markets where the company plans to launch the service,” the MSO said.

Suddenlink unveiled Operation GigaSpeed in August 2014, announcing that it intended to raise its top downstream high-speed Internet speed to 1 Gbps in 90% of its footprint by 2017. The initiative encompasses network upgrades, including all-digital migrations that free up valuable bandwidth for things like DOCSIS channel bonding, and the replacing of remaining deployed DOCSIS 2.0 modems with D3.0 CPE.

Suddenlink Communications has joined a growing group of MVPDs that have struck distribution agreements with Hulu that will enable its customers to access the subscription OTT service on leased devices.

Suddenlink, an operator with 1.1 million TV subs that’s in the process of being acquired by Altice Group for $9.1 billion, said it expects to make Hulu available via its TiVo devices later this year, noting that the new partnership with Hulu was enabled in part via the MSO’s deal with TiVo announced in July 2010. Suddenlink also offers its own VOD service and Netflix on leased TiVo devices. 

“We're working with Internet content providers like Hulu in a continuing effort to offer innovative solutions that benefit consumers,” Kathy Payne, Suddenlink’s chief programming officer said, in a statement. “Our ongoing network investments allow us to deliver Hulu to our customers with Internet connections that tend to be the fastest and highest-ranked in the communities we serve.”

"We are excited about integrating Hulu¹s content and experience into Suddenlink¹s set-top boxes, so that consumers have seamless  and simple access to the content they love, all in one place,” added Tim Connolly, Hulu’s senior vice president, distribution.

Hulu has inked similar deals with Cablevision Systems, Armstrong, Atlantic Broadband, Mediacom Communications, Midcontinent Communications and WideOpenWest. AT&T also has plans to distribute Hulu via its network of websites and mobile apps, and is exploring the possibility of bringing a Hulu app to TV.

Speaking at the INTX show in Chicago earlier this month, Connolly said Hulu's MVPD partners will also get a share of Hulu's subscription revenue. Hulu’s subscription service currently fetches $7.99 per month.

Joe Canavan, vice president of product management and sales at Atlantic Broadband, said in an interview (subscription required) that the company also plans to integrate the Hulu app on TiVo-powered boxes that the operator leases to pay TV customers. In addition to tying Hulu’s catalog into the platform’s search and discovery system, the operator also intends to offer some genre-based Hulu “channels,” such as one focused on kid’s programming, that deep-link the viewer to specific Hulu titles.

UPDATED:Altice to Buy Suddenlink Stake for $9.1B

The continuing cable M&A soap opera took a new turn Tuesday night, as reports surfaced that European telecom company Altice was in late stage talks to acquire mid-sized operator Suddenlink Communications in a deal that values the St. Louis-based company at between $8 billion and $10 billion.

 According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which was confirmed by outside sources familiar with the talks, a deal could be announced as early as this week.

The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said that Luxembourg-based Altice has been looking for U.S.-based assets for months and recently acquired French wireless carrier SFR in a $23 billion deal. Suddenlink, which is owned by private equity fund BC Partners and Canadian pension fund CPPIB, has about 1.4 million customers in a dozen states, including Texas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

According to sources in the financial community, BC Partners had expected to use Suddenlink and its founder, chairman and CEO Jerry Kent, a long-time cable executive, as a vehicle to roll up smaller operators in the cable industry.

The price, if accurate, would be a nice premium to BC Partners’ $6.6 billion valuation for the company in 2012.

Consolidation and the added scale it would bring has been a buzzword in the cable business for about two years, particularly after cable legend and Liberty Media chairman John Malone invested about $4 billion for a 27% stake in Charter Communications. Shortly after that investment Charter began a year-long pursuit of Time Warner Cable, which ultimately led to it being outbid by Comcast in February 2014. On April 24, after 14 months, Comcast terminated the TWC deal, after it became clear regulators would not approve the transaction.

Suddenlink could be a vehicle for Altice to expand its presence in the U.S., rolling up some of the estimated 600 independent cable operators scattered across the country. 

But Suddenlink is not without its problems. The midsized operator has been a vocal critic of rising programming costs and, in October, it dropped Viacom’s cable channels, a move that initially led to a sharp rise in basic-video customer losses, which has since leveled off.

Suddenlink spokesman Pete Abel declined to comment on rumor and speculation.

Suddenlink would give the Luxembourg-based Altice a foothold in the U.S., but the Journal said the telecom giant is looking for an even bigger slice of the market and has held preliminary talks with Time Warner Cable about a possible deal.

But TWC, which recently terminated its $67 billion merger with Comcast and has been the target of Charter Communications, may be too much for Altice to swallow. With a market capitalization of about $32 billion, Altice is smaller than TWC, which has a market cap of about $45 billion.

Time Warner Cable officials could not be reached for comment.

And with about 10.8 million customers, federal regulators may be unwilling to let such a large provider of television and broadband services as TWC slip into the hands of a foreign company. Any deal would have to pass muster with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as well as the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice.

Aiming to improve its communications path with customers, Suddenlink Communications has tapped a cloud-based platform from Fonolo to supply a customer call-back option that reaches out to customers directly instead of placing them on hold.

Suddenlink, which serves about 1.4 million customers, began to install Fonolo’s call-back platform in its contact center last July,  and estimates that it has already saved customers more than 400,000 minutes in hold time.

With Fonolo’s “In-Call Rescue” in place, customers now have the option to press 1 on their touch-tone phones to receive a call back instead of waiting on hold, without losing their place in line. When the customer’s turn arrives, the system places a call to the customer with a live agent.

"Suddenlink is committed to providing a superior customer experience," said Gibbs Jones, SVP of customer experience at Suddenlink, in a statement. "Implementing Fonolo’s call-back solution has been a huge success. To date we have saved our customers over 400,000 minutes in hold time and reduced our abandonment rate by 25%. It’s clear that offering a call-back option is essential to providing excellent customer service."

About 75% of callers consider the notion of a call-back feature “highly appealing,” according to a Forrester Research study. 

Suddenlink Communications isn’t revealing a lot of technical detail for “Operation GigaSpeed,” a new initiative that aims to offer downstream speeds of 1 Gbps in 90% of its footprint by 2017, alongside significant speed boosts for other high-speed Internet tiers.

Given that DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging CableLabs spec that is targeting multi-gigabit speeds, is about two years away from scaled deployments, I asked the MSO if Operation GigaSpeed “hinged on” the 3.1 technology, and the answer was no. And the company declined to answer if FTTP would factor into Operation GigaSpeed, particularly in greenfields. Then again, there might be an opportunity for Suddenlink to pull fiber all the way to the home just for those 1-Gig customers of the future. After all, Comcast has been using FTTP in one-off fashion for the 505 Mbps broadband service it's currently offering in a portion of its markets.

But it seems that DOCSIS 3.0 technology could play a role, amplified by the fact that Suddenlink’s initiative calls for the swapping out of DOCSIS 2.0 modems with DOCSIS 3.0 CPE and an all-digital video conversion that will allow the operator to reclaim and reuse precious analog spectrum.

Current-generation D3 modems can bond 24 downstream channels, so they can burst near 1 Gbps, but probably not support a service that advertise speeds of 1-Gig. Broadcom is looking to raise the bar with a D3 chipset that can bond up to 32 downstream channels, enough for 1.2 Gbps bursts on North American DOCSIS networks that use 6 MHz-wide channels. 

That extra headroom is helpful, but would still seem to be a stretch, without knowing Suddenlink’s full plan and whether it includes a move to higher modulations that will pump out more bits per hertz, or if chipmakers are already working on new generations of D3 silicon that can bond more than 32 channels. But Suddenlink has given itself some time and runway to figure it out. 

Meanwhile, Cox Communications has also planted its 1-Gig flag in the ground, expecting to start deployments of Gigabit speeds to all markets by the end of 2016, while getting action underway initially in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha by the fourth quarter of this year.

Cox, like Suddenlink, hasn’t spelled outs its tech roadmap, either, but has acknowledged that “all options are on the table.”