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.
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.