Over the past few months, Optimum trucks operated by Altice crews have been fanned out throughout Norwalk, stringing spools of cable along utility poles and conduits. It is not the coaxial cable the company’s customers know well, however, but the fiber optic variety which pulses digital bits of information over glass strands, at transmission capacities vastly superior to that of coaxial cable or copper wire.
Verizon Communications was the first company to introduce the concept of running fiber optic cable to U.S. homes on a mass scale, as part of its Fios offering introduced more than a decade ago. Norwalk-based Frontier Communications inherited a portion of that Fios infrastructure in its 2016 acquisition of Verizon territories in Florida, Texas and California.
In May 2015, Altice predecessor company Cablevision sued Verizon in federal court on claims Verizon was misleading customers in promising them an all-fiber network, with the companies ultimately reaching an undisclosed settlement of the litigation.
Now Altice is promising an all-fiber connection all its own with its “Generation Gigaspeed” offering in Optimum territories in the metropolitan New York City area as well as other parts of the country, with the company announcing the initiative a year ago. An Altice spokeswoman did not provide Hearst Connecticut Media with any expected launch date or pricing for the new service.
It is one of three major technical changes Altice is undergoing under CEO Dexter Goei, along with a new “Altice One” device that combines the functions of the cable box, modem and wireless router. Separately, Altice reached an agreement this month to offer mobile phone service for the first time by piggybacking on Sprint’s cellular network, while maintaining its own phone features and billing.
“Broadband continues to be a key contributor here as we are seeing continued demand for higher-speed tiers,” Goei said in early November during a conference call. “As we invest more in ‘Generation Gigaspeed’ ... we should see continued improvement in customer service metrics, reduce churn, and further efficiency savings.”
©2017 The Hour (Norwalk, Conn.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
