Altice USA Loses 39,000 Broadband Subscribers
The cable operator has 3 million fiber passings, and is planning to deploy fiber to another 175,000 locations in 2025.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13, 2025 – Altice USA reported 39,300 total broadband losses in the fourth quarter of 2024, in line with Wall Street expectations. The cable operator gained 56,600 fiber subscribers.
The company also reported 68,100 new fiber passings, for a total of nearly 3 million out of a total footprint of 9.8 million. In 2025, the ISP is planning to build fiber to an additional 175,000 new locations.
Altice USA’s mobile service, provided via a deal with T-Mobile, scooped up 39,500 more subscribers, for a total of 459,600. The company said 5.7 percent of its broadband customers had taken up a mobile plan, lower than Comcast and Charter.
Executives also announced a new network upgrade plan that would see multi-gigabit speeds to 65 percent of its footprint by the end of 2028. That would come from a mix of “mid-split” upgrades to its cable networks, which allow higher speeds more comparable to fiber, and fiber deployments.
“The historic strategy was to do these incredibly expensive node splits for tens of thousands of dollars,” Altice USA CEO Dennis Mathew said on the company’s earnings call.
By comparison, Marc Sirota, the company’s CFO, said the mid-split upgrades would cost about $100 per location.
“So you can see our long-term roadmap around how we get to 65 percent multi-gig speeds over time, we can do that in a very capital efficient manner,” he said.
MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said cutting spending generally was a good thing – the company has nearly $25 billion in debt that will start to mature in 2027 – but noted the other major cable providers have been on the mid-split train for years.
“Their ‘announcement’ that they will upgrade more of their plant via mid-splits and DOCSIS 4.0, and (presumably) less with FTTH – there are no concrete numbers offered for the mix – is a bit of an anti-climax,” he wrote in an investor note. “Of course that’s what they’re doing.”
Mathew said Altice USA plans to launch new plans targeted at low-income households in the first half of the year. He said it would offer “worry-free pricing, easy sign-up, flexible payments options,” as well as a mobile
That will be “particularly important in the West,” Mathew said, where the company has a greater proportion of its footprint in low-income areas and where it’s facing “headwinds from these fiber overbuilders.” The company also has fewer fiber locations in the region.
Analysts at New Street Research have pegged Altice USA as a potential target for acquisition – major national ISPs have been and are expected to continue buying up regional providers – assuming the debt-laden company’s finances are under control. Analyst Jonathan Chaplin flagged in a note ahead of the call that EBITDA, a metric used as an indicator of operational efficiency, missed analyst expectations because of higher than expected costs.
“The cost increases in [Q4] create some uncertainty, though they probably don’t change the story. This is particularly true if they were driven by wireless,” he wrote. “Comcast and Charter will have much better wireless economics, and so this will be a source of synergy.”
In response to a question from Chaplin, Sirota said direct costs were “really tied to the acceleration you see out of our mobile business.” He said the company was “optimistic that we're on a path here to return to long-term sustainable EBITDA growth.”
