Rebranded Altice Says Competition is Ratcheting Up
Altice USA is now Optimum Communications, the company said Thursday as it also announced its latest quarterly earnings. Optimum said it lost 58,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter due to increasingly aggressive price offers and greater marketing spending by fiber and, especially, fixed wireless access competitors. It ended Q3 with 3.9 million residential broadband subscribers, versus 4 million in Q3 2024.
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In a call with analysts, CEO Dennis Mathew said the company "must be bolder" in its strategies to stabilize its broadband performance. Operators in the broadband industry are spending more on subscriber acquisition as more of them compete for increasingly price-sensitive customers, he said. Optimum expects to start offering 2 Gbps speeds later this month in a market where it has hybrid fiber-coax, with more markets expected in 2026, Mathew added.
Optimum also said it ended the most recent quarter with 1.7 million residential video subscribers, compared with 1.9 million the same quarter a year earlier, and 584,000 mobile lines, up from 420,000. Revenues for the quarter were $2.1 billion, down from $2.2 billion, due to cord-cutting, CFO Marc Sirota said.
In regard to the new name, the company said it's part of a unified rebranding around its Optimum brand identity.