The US launches a five-year plan to replace copper with fiber to build 10Gbps fiber networks

Although the G.Fast technology based on copper telephone lines has made new progress last week, the general trend of optical fiber replacing copper is irreversible. Altice USA, which has become the fourth largest cable TV company in the United States through the acquisition of Cablevision and Suddenlink, has now announced the launch of a five-year plan for a fiber optic network with a speed of up to 10Gbps, replacing the traditional copper cable network with fast fiber-to-the-home technology.

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Fourth largest cable TV company in the U.S. launches five-year plan for 10Gbps fiber optic network

Currently, copper-based cable TV networks still dominate the broadband market in the United States, and are significantly better than DSL networks that use copper telephone lines in terms of transmission. However, compared with transmission materials, optical fiber is obviously faster than copper cables, especially in terms of upload speed. Therefore, many cable TV companies in the United States, such as Comcast, have begun to deploy fiber-to-the-home plans, but their user coverage is not as good as Altice USA.

Altice USA now has 4.1 million broadband customers and 3.6 million pay-TV customers. If customers who use multiple services are included, the company has 4.6 million customers in 20 states.

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Fiber optic networks have more advantages in data transmission

Altice USA's five-year fiber-to-the-home plan will gradually expand from 2017. Although upgrading the fiber network is very expensive, Altice USA said it will reduce the cost of equipment deployment through innovative network architecture and further improve the overall efficiency of the existing fiber network to control the overall investment budget.

For cable TV users, Altice USA said it will improve the speed of existing copper cable lines by deploying the latest DOCSIS 3.1 technology. The DOCSIS 3.1 technical specification can increase the bandwidth capacity of cable TV networks, up to 10G downstream and 1G upstream.

However, just as the recent setbacks in the deployment of Google Fiber, the upgrade and deployment of fiber networks cannot be smooth sailing. Therefore, whether Altice USA's five-year plan can be finally realized remains to be seen.