Altice (ATUS) Rebrands Mobile Service Under One National Brand
Altice USA, Inc. ATUS recently rebranded its national mobile service dubbed Altice Mobile to Optimum Mobile, as part of its effort to align all the services under a single national Optimum brand. The corporate rebranding exercise is likely to better resonate the objectives of the company and offer seamless connectivity to all users.
Altice had launched its mobile services in 2019 under a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) agreement with the erstwhile Sprint. This enabled the cable operator to offer wireless mobile services using the communications network infrastructure of Sprint without actually owing it. With the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile US, Inc. TMUS, almost all of Altice’s existing MVNO subscribers have migrated to the latter’s network, offering customers nationwide wireless coverage on one of the largest and fastest 5G network.
The company presently operates in 21 states across the country, under the Optimum brand in the New York tri-state area and Suddenlink across West and mid-Atlantic states. With the mobile rebranding, Altice aims to offer a unified wireless service to strengthen its corporate brand identity. The rechristened Optimum Mobile comes up with a plethora of attractive wireless plans to offer more choice and flexibility to choose and shift from one plan to the other without any extra charge. Customers will enjoy exclusive benefits and extra discounts if they select an integrated offering of the company’s broadband connectivity services and Optimum Mobile, with the option to cancel the plan anytime.
The mobile service is a network of networks that delivers advanced Long-Term Evolution (LTE) coverage by combining the company’s fiber and mobile infrastructures with T-Mobile network. The company also has a roaming agreement in place with AT&T Inc. T LTE networks to deliver 99% nationwide coverage and offer a single plan with unlimited data, text and talk nationwide, mobile hotspot, video streaming, international text and talk to more than 35 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Israel.
Altice has been accelerating the pace of its network rollouts. It is witnessing healthy momentum in customer penetration, typically reaching about 40% within a year of the rollout in new-build areas. The company witnessed robust demand for its broadband service in first-quarter 2021 with a 39% year-over-year increase in average data usage per customer. Broadband-only customer usage averaged 613 GB per month. The company has accelerated the deployment of 1-gig speeds, which are currently available in more than 92% of its geographical footprint.
By the end of first-quarter 2021, Altice covered more than 1 million homes with fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology. The company remains positive on the future of its FTTH deployment initiatives and believes that the FTTH network will be more resilient with reduced maintenance requirements and lower power usage. Altice is building a fiber network to deliver broadband speeds of up to 10 Gbps, which underscores its investment in technology.
The stock has gained 40.7% in the past year compared with the industry’s rally of 40.1%.
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Altice currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). A better-ranked stock in the broader industry is Arista Networks, Inc. ANET, carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Arista has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 12.7%. It delivered an earnings surprise of 6.1%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.
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