California upgrades Altice's fiber, but the favor isn't returned

28 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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California didn’t make the cut for Altice’s fiber to the home upgrades, but it has upgraded one town here to gigabit-level cable modem service. In a press release praising its own FTTH ambitions, Altice was careful to point out that only three contiguous northeastern states are on its fiber list. States which also happen to be where it faces competition from Verizon’s FiOS FTTH service…

Design and construction have commenced for several hundred thousand homes concurrently in areas of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The Company is on track to reach one million homes constructed by year end 2018.

That’s also a region that Altice picked up when it purchased Cablevision last year, in its second, and by far its largest, acquisition of U.S. cable systems. Its first was Suddenlink, a much smaller operator that has a few scattered outposts in California. Although Altice left the door open to upgrading Suddenlink systems when it first unveiled its FTTH plans, so far it hasn’t walked through it.

What it has done in Suddenlink’s territory is boost the capacity of some of its hybrid fiber-cable systems. So far, the press release says, Altice has upgraded “more than 60 percent of its Suddenlink footprint” to gigabit levels, presumably via DOCSIS 3.1 technology.

That 60 percent only includes one Californian community, Mammoth Lakes. What’s different about it? Altice doesn’t say, but I’ll make a guess. Mammoth Lakes is in Mono County, and Digital 395 runs right through it. It’s an open access fiber network that stretches 500 miles from Reno to Barstow along the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, paid for by grants from the California Advanced Services fund and the federal stimulus program. Long before it was a gleam in Altice’s eye, Suddenlink hooked into it and boosted service speeds in Mammoth Lakes by a factor of ten, at no extra cost to its subscribers.

Fast and cheap middle mile access makes a difference.