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Verizon Laughs Off Altice Fiber to the Home Announcement

Earlier this week Suddenlink and Cablevision owner Altice surprised many by announcing plans to skip DOCSIS 3.1 cable upgrades, and instead deploy a territory-wide 10 Gbps-capable fiber to the home network. It was surprising in large part because the company has a bit of a reputation for skimping on necessary upgrades overseas, and Suddenlink employees had been complaining the company was creating a "culture of fear" with layoffs and nitpicked expenditures.

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With the company now promising fiber to the home across its entire footprint, one of the biggest impacts will be on Verizon -- a company that has frozen most of its fixed-line upgrades to focus on wireless and getting into the ad industry (its acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo).

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon tried to downplay the impact Altice's plans will have on the company's bottom line.

“A fiber-to-the-home network? What a novel idea. I guess that’s why we started building ours back in 2003 and it’s now available to nearly 14 million homes and businesses,” a Verizon spokesman said.

Again, though, Verizon has made it clear that the lion's share of its attention is fixed on either content or advertising, or 5G wireless. But Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei tells the Journal he doesn't believe that even 5G wireless will be able to match the speed and reliability of fiber optic broadband.

“We know that there will be applications and demand for further bandwidth going forward, whether that is in two, three, four or five years,” Mr. Goei said.

The Altice announcement will hopefully be good news for Verizon, Suddenlink and Cablevision customers alike, as it may force Verizon to compete more seriously on price -- while prodding Verizon to bump its top available FiOS speeds from 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

Most recommended from 56 comments



SimbaSeven
I Void Warranties
join:2003-03-24
Billings, MT
·StarLink

28 recommendations

SimbaSeven

Member

Laugh all you want VZ..


FiOS Map @ fiberforall.org
If Altice pulls this off, they will have a footprint larger than Verizon and a current, up to date network to handle it.

Last time I heard, VZ stopped or slowed down deployment of FiOS?
Corporate
join:2014-10-04

5 recommendations

Corporate

Member

Verizon is scared...

Verizon is scared...And they should be.

Altice is doing great things with Suddenlink, such as market-wide gigabit. Also, speeds are increasing in Cablevision territory, unlike what Charter is doing.

Altice continues to improve. These are two acquisitions that are shaping-up to actually be positive for consumers.
Bob61571
join:2008-08-08
Washington, IL

5 recommendations

Bob61571

Member

VZ has NO Room to Laugh...

VZ spokesperson mocking Altice, by mentioning "we started building ours back in 2003". What have you been doing VZ? You could have expanded FiOS nationwide, but you dumped 10's of millions of slow DSL customers onto other smaller providers. These markets were urban/suburban/rural where you could have actually shown the viability of fiber yourself, and been a nationwide fiber leader with FiOS. Meanwhile, FiOS has lost its bright, shiny image. VZ, you took a great asset and failed to follow through.

w0g
o.O
join:2001-08-30
Springfield, OR

3 recommendations

w0g

Member

can someone let Altice please buy Comcast/Time Warner/Charter/Cox

only Altice has made the correct choice for broadband. fuck this incremental upgrade path shit that everyone with Copper has chosen, leaving us 20 years behind.

in Japan they fucking deployed fiber decades ago and had 100Mbps-1Gbps symmetrical speeds back when DSLREPORTS was popular in 2001. everyone used to talk about it on the site. back then Cablevision was the only company in the whole states with 10Mbps/1Mbps service, everyone else was capped at 1.5Mbps/128k or slower like 256k/256k. everyone was quite jealous. now once again we're all jealous only Cablevision and Suddenlink subscribers will have solid 10Gbps service for at least a decade to come, unless someone buys up these other companies and forces them to upgrade over profits.