- Optimum is focused on improving its broadband trends
- But in Q1 2026 it reported broadband subscriber net losses of 64,000
- The company is seeing a lot of competition from fixed wireless access across its footprint
In late 2025, Altice USA officially changed its corporate name to Optimum Communications and changed its stock exchange ticker from ATUS to OPTU. Yesterday, Optimum Communications posted its first quarter 2026 earnings, reporting broadband losses worse than expected and saying one of its main goals is to improve broadband trends.
Optimum CEO Dennis Mathew kicked off the call saying, “As we entered 2026, we were clear that this needs to be a year of sharper execution, smarter competitive response and continued transformation.”
It reported broadband subscriber net losses of 64,000 in the quarter, or 56,000 excluding a subscriber adjustment taken in the quarter related to prior periods.
New Street Research analyst Vikash Harlalka wrote, “It will take a monumental effort from Optimum to do better in 2H 26 vs. 2H 25. We are rooting for them to show us that we are wrong, but ….we expect consensus to reset after this quarter’s results and for broadband subscriber loss estimates to increase.”
Mathew said, “The broadband environment in the first quarter remained as competitive as any we have seen. Across our footprint, ILECs, fixed wireless providers and fiber overbuilders all continue to lean aggressively into lower entry pricing, extended price locks and promotional incentives.”
Optimum breaks its footprint into two regions: Its East footprint is concentrated around the New York City area, and its West footprint is the old Suddenlink business in states including Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, etc.
Mathew said the West, in particular, is challenging with the expansion of fixed wireless access (FWA) and fiber builders.
FWA overlaps about 85% of Optimum’s East footprint and almost 80% in the West. “We have all the players across the board, T-Mobile and AT&T as well as Verizon,” said Mathew. “We compete very heavily with T-Mo in the East and AT&T in particular, and T-Mo in the West.”
Optimum’s fiber business
Optimum is still primarily a cable internet provider with HFC technology, but it has been expanding fiber deployments in recent years, offering its Optimum Fiber, which now passes over 3.1 million homes.
Mathew said, “We remain focused on building fiber, selling fiber and continuing to migrate customers organically within our base, having expanded our network by over 500,000 homes passed over the past three years.”
But he added that the company is prioritizing new fiber builds right now rather than migrating customers from HFC to fiber. “Over time, we expect to reengage more proactively to transition customers to fiber,” said Mathew. “But in the current environment, we are focused on investing where we see the highest near-term returns and greatest impact on long-term value creation.”
Optimizing capex
For Q1 the company spent $308 million on capital expenditures. It anticipates total capex in 2026 in the range of $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion.
Optimum CFO Marc Sirota said the company ended the first quarter with about 10 million total passings, and 3.1 million of those passings were fiber. During the last 12 months it added 190,000 fiber passings. But it’s scaling back a bit this year, expecting 150,000 to 175,000 new passings.
“As you recall, in prior years, we had a more significant fiber overbuild program across our existing footprint,” said Sirota. “And we have since pulled back on that activity as we have shifted our investment focus. Where we do not have fiber, we are investing in our HFC network, leveraging mid-split frequency allocations to increase bandwidth, and we are testing new technologies and architectures to improve the efficient use of capacity to enable higher speeds across certain markets.”
Analyst reaction
TD Cowen analyst Gregory Williams wrote, “Optimum posted downside 1Q 26 results as the company sacrificed ARPU, and in turn deliberately sacrificed EBITDA, to standardize a more competitive pricing structure across its footprint.”
New Street Research’s Harlalka wrote, “Two opposing forces will affect 2Q broadband subscriber trends including 1) seasonality, and 2) improvement in gross adds due to new pricing and packaging. We expect the two forces to nearly cancel each other.”
New Street is predicting broadband subscriber losses of close to 60,000 in the second quarter 2026, compared to consensus, which was looking for subscriber losses of only 41,000.