Late last week Altice released a press announcement that said they are going to bring fiber-to-the-home to all of their newly acquired US properties within five years. For those not familiar with Altice, the company is now the fourth biggest cable company in the US and was created through the recent acquisitions of Suddenlink Communications for $9.1 billion and of Cablevision for $17.7 billion. These acquisitions bring the company about 4.6 million customers.

But there are parts of the press release that have me scratching my head. The headlines announce ‘A full-scale fiber-to-the-home network investment plan’ which will bring ‘large scale fiber-to-the-home deployment across its footprint.’ That sure sounds like the company will give everybody FTTP.

But deeper in the press release are several statements that have me wondering what the company is really planning to do. For example, they say they will ‘drive fiber deeper into our infrastructure.’ Deeper into the infrastructure is not necessarily the same as providing fiber the whole way to the home. That is the same kind of language that Comcast used when they announced their mostly-imaginary 2 gigabit broadband product.

Even more puzzling is the statement that “the new architecture will result in a more efficient and robust network with a significant reduction in energy consumption. Altice expects to reinvest efficiency savings to support the buildout without a material change in its overall capital budget.’ If Altice has 4.6 million customers then they must have around 6 million passings. They will be able to build a lot of the needed network by overlashing fiber onto existing coaxial cable. But even that will probably cost in the range of $500 per passing, meaning an outlay of $3 billion. And to bring fiber into the home costs in the range of $600 to $800 per customer. Add to that the core FTTP electronics of at least $200 per customer and the cost to converting existing customers to the fiber could cost another $3.7 to $4.6 billion, for a total outlay of at least $6.7 billion to $7.6 billion.

The energy savings they are talking about would be due to shutting down the existing hybrid fiber-coaxial cable network. To achieve that savings they would have to convert every customer to fiber – since it take as much electricity to run a network for a handful of customers as it does to run it for everybody. But I have a hard time believing they can save enough in power costs to pay for an expensive new fiber network without having to increase capital budgets. I have a number of clients operating HFC networks and they do not have gigantic power bills of anywhere the magnitude needed to produce that kind of savings.

This FTTP plan also has to be compared back to Altice’s promises to their shareholders. They promised to bring significant cost savings after the acquisition of Suddenlink and Cablevision and it’s already hard to see how they are going to do that. For example, their largest property is in New York and they promised the PUC there not to eliminate any customer-facing jobs (technicians and customers service reps) for five years.

They also talk about their fiber rollouts in Portugal and France. In Portugal fiber is being deployed mostly due to heavy subsidies from the government which is hoping that fiber will boost a poor economy. And in France their business plan is different than the US and Altice benefits greatly from a quad play that includes cellular service. My quick analysis of their financial performance shows that wireless drives a big piece of their profitability there, and it’s unlikely they are going to figure out a profitable wireless play here in the US.

Finally, the company seems to have spent heavily this past year on upgrading existing HFC cable networks. I’ve read a dozen local press releases in Suddenlink markets that talk about completing digital conversions and upping data speeds to as much as a gigabit using DOCSIS 3.0. It’s curious they would pour that much money into their HFC networks if they are getting ready to abandon them for fiber.

I hope I am wrong about this and I hope they bring fiber everywhere. That would certainly highlight Comcast and Charter’s decision to milk their HFC networks for decades to come. But the press-release as a whole sets off my radar and is reminiscent of similar press releases in recent years from AT&T and Comcast talking about gigabit deployments. There are just too many parts of this press release that don’t add up.