Altice USA said it will launch a 5 Gigabit per second broadband service in parts of its Long Island, New York footprint in June, along with a lower-priced 2Gbps product, more than twice the speeds offered by its competition in the market.
The 5Gbps service will be priced for new customers at $180 per month, with the 2Gbps offering costing new subscribers $120 per month. Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei said in a press release that the multi-gig offering will be available across its New York, New Jersey and Connecticut fiber footprint by the end of the year.
Altice USA said it would speed up the build out of its fiber network throughout its footprint earlier this year, aimed at bringing faster speeds to customers. The company lost about 13,000 broadband subscribers in Q1 -- the only major cable operator to do so -- and has made some big changes in the past few months including rebranding its service, to win them back.
Other operators have offered multi-gig service -- Comcast currently offers a 3Gbps service (Gigabit Pro) in all its markets for $299 per month and recently tested a 400Gbps service -- but offerings generally top out at about 1Gbps. And CableLabs’ DOCSIS 4.0 standard is supposed to enable speeds of up to 10Gbps once it is deployed.
There are critics that have said most users don’t need speeds that fast -- most can stream video and access the internet with speeds as low as 100 Megabits per second -- but as bandwidth hogging applications like virtual reality, 4K TVs and multiple connected devices proliferate, they may benefit from faster service. According to researcher OpenVault, average data usage for US consumers has doubled since 2018.
In a press release, Altice USA said the multi-gig services are symmetrical, meaning customers will receive the same upload and download speeds. The higher speeds also will allow customers to access higher resolution video streaming up to 8K; lower latency which helps in data intensive applications like virtual reality and gaming; greater reliability and Smart WiFi6 for greater whole home coverage.
“As we continue to expand our new 100% Optimum Fiber Internet network across our footprint, we are pleased to bring the fastest residential fiber internet service to the tri-state area,” Goei said in a press release. “Customers on our Optimum Fiber network are already enjoying fast, symmetrical speeds and a reliable connectivity experience, and we look forward to bringing even faster service with more bandwidth than ever before with our 5 Gig and 2 Gig Optimum Fiber Internet speeds.”
