Altice USA Eyes FTTP Milestone

Altice USA said it’s on track to reach 1 million homes constructed with fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology by year-end 2018 as it moves ahead on design and construction work to “several hundred thousand homes” in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The update comes almost nine months after Altice USA announced it would skip DOCSIS 3.1 and instead focus on a FTTP upgrade that will reach the bulk of its footprint over the next five years. That initiative, called Generation Gigaspeed, aims to bring FTTP to its entire Optimum (former Cablevision Systems) footprint and to most of its Suddenlink footprint.

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“For us, it’s a real game-changer,” Dexter Goei, Altice USA’s chairman and CEO, said at the time, noting that the company will also apply the knowhow and the experience with FTTP in Europe to the new project and leverage the advancements made by Altice Labs, which is based in Portugal. He also said then that Altice USA is comfortable that it can complete the upgrade “without materially changing the capital outlay that we do today.”

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Altice USA offered the update as Altice founder Patrick Drahi joined Goei at a fiber deployment site last Friday (August 11) on Long Island.

"We are incredibly pleased with the progress we are making on our fiber investment and look forward to lighting up this new, advanced network to enable innovative products and services to support our customers’ connectivity needs well into the future,” Goei said in a statement.